"Flirty Gertie! Now you'll begin teasing me with that all our life--the way I didn't slap your face that night when I should have. I just couldn't have, honey. Goes to show we were just cut and dried for each other, don't it? Me, a girl that never in her life let a fellow even bat his eyes at her without an introduction. But that night when you winked, honey--something inside of me just winked back."
"You mean it, boy? You ain't sorry about nothing, Jimmie?"
"You saw the way--she--May--you saw for yourself what she was, when we saw her walking, that next night after Ceiner's, nearly staggering, up Sixth Avenue with Budge Evans."
"I never took any stock in her, honey. I was just letting her like me."
She sat back on the box edge, regarding him, her face so soft and wont to smile that she could not keep her composure.
"Get me my hat and coat, honey. We'll walk down. Got the key?"
They skirmished in the gloom, moving through slit-like aisles of furniture and packing-box.
"Oh, the running water is hot, Jimmie, just like the ad said! We got red-hot running water in our flat. Close the front windows, honey. We don't want it to rain in on our new green sofa. Not 'til it's paid for, anyways."
They met at the door, kissing on the inside and the outside of it; at the head of the fourth, third, and the second balustrade down.
"We'll always make 'em little love landings, Jimmie, so we can't ever get tired climbing them."
Outside there was still a pink glow in a clean sky. The first flush of spring in the air had died, leaving chill. They walked briskly, arm in arm, down the asphalt incline of sidewalk leading from their apartment house, a new street of canned homes built on a hillside--the sepulchral abode of the city's trapped whose only escape is down the fire-escape, and then only when the alternative is death. At the base of the hill there flows, in constant hubbub, a great up-and-down artery of street, repeating itself, mile after mile, in terms of the butcher, the baker, and the "every-other-corner drug-store of a million dollar corporation". Housewives with perambulators and oil-cloth shopping bags. Children on rollerskates. The din of small tradesmen and the humdrum of every city block where the homes remain unbearded all summer and every wife is on haggling terms with the purveyor of her evening roundsteak and mess of rutabaga.