Following this little disturbance the Sims couple, lowering their heads, side by side, resolutely regained the smooth rut of their placid existence. Everything in this world is easier than is imagined. Much easier. In the case of the Sims' household, it was just a matter of adding each morning, to the daily shave of Charles-Norton, another operation quite as facile.

"Dolly," he would call, as soon as his hot towel had removed from his ruddy cheeks the last bubbles of lather.

And Dolly, her hungry little scissors agleam in her hand, trotted in alacriously. She sat Charles-Norton on the edge of the tub and bent over him her happy, humming head. Zip-zip-zip, went the scissors, zip-zip—and a soft white fluff that looked like the stuffing of a pillow (an A-one pillow; not the kind upon which Charles-Norton and Dolly laid their modest heads) eddied slowly to Charles-Norton's feet while he shivered slightly to the coldness of the steel. (Dolly cut very close.)

Then, "All right; all done," she sang, dropping the scissors into the round pocket of her crackling apron; "now to breakfast, quick! And here's a kiss for the good boy."

Placing her red lips upon his, she whisked off to the kitchenette; and Charles-Norton, emerging all dressed a little later, found the cheerful blue ware on the table, and his waffles upon his plate, hot beneath his napkin. After which, stuffing the morning paper into his pocket, he departed with another kiss on the landing, and strode forth for the L. Life was just as before.

And yet, not quite. Because, to tell the truth, Charles-Norton was not absolutely happy.

He could not have told what was the matter. Mostly, it was an emptiness. An emptiness is hard to analyze. He knew that there was much of which he should be content. With the careful repression of the vagaries of his shoulders, there had come to him a new attentiveness at his work. His nose, now, never wandered after passing butterflies, and his salary had been raised to twenty-two dollars a week. Also, the ridiculous flapping had gone, and the impulse to draw fool lines upon a card.

But with these—and that was the trouble—other things had vanished. That deep filling of his lungs with spring, for instance. And the longing that went with it. That was it—the longing. He longed for the longing—if that is comprehensible. He longed vaguely for a longing that had been his, and which was gone. He never saw, now, a land that was as a golden pool beneath a turquoise dome; nor a boy in the wild oats watching a circling hawk.

And there was something else, something more definite. He felt that Dolly—yes, Dolly took too much pleasure, altogether too much pleasure in that clipping business. Of course, the clipping had to be. He knew that. A respectable man can't have feathers on his shoulders. It was necessary. But somehow he would have felt that necessity more, if Dolly had felt it—less. He would have liked a chance to voice it himself. If Dolly, now, only would, some fine morning, say, "Oh, Goosie, let them be to-day; they are so pretty," then he could have answered, very firmly, "No, clip away!" But she never gave him that chance. She was always so radiantly ready! As he watched her head in the mirror, bent upon the busy scissors with an expression of tight determination, a distinct irritation seized him sometimes.

Charles-Norton, in short, was accumulating, drop by drop, a masculine grouch. A grouch deeper than he realized, till that morning.

That morning Dolly, in the midst of the daily operation, paused with scissors in air, a sudden inspiration upon her brow.

"Oh, Goosie," she exclaimed; "How would it be to cauterize them?"

Charles-Norton gave a jump. "Cauterize!" he cried; "cauterize what?"

"Why, the little feathers. Supposing we burned the place, you know, with nitrate of silver, or something like that. They do it to people who have moles—or when they have been bitten by a mad dog. Maybe—maybe it would stop it—altogether."

Charles-Norton looked up at her. Her cheeks were rosy, her eyes were bright; she was excited and pleased with her ingenious idea. A cold wave rose about Charles-Norton and closed over his head. "Say,'" he bawled ungraciously; "what do you take me for! Think I'm made of asbestos?"

Discreet Dolly immediately dropped the subject; though somehow Charles-Norton had the distinct impression that it was only discreetly that she did so, that, in fact, she was not dropping the idea, but merely tucking it away somewhere within the secret hiding-places of her being, for further use. He could still see it, in fact, graven there upon the whiteness of her voluntary little forehead.

He brooded black over it all day. He brooded on other things, too—insignificant things that had happened in the past, that had not mattered one whit then, but which now, beneath his fostering care, began to grow into big, flapping boog-a-boos. And when he returned that night, he was a very mean Charles-Norton. He spoke hardly a word at dinner, pretended he did not like the vanilla custard over which Dolly had toiled all day, her soul aglow with creative delight, sipped but half of his demi-tasse (as though the coffee were bitter, which it wasn't), and went off to bed early with a good-night so frigid that Dolly's little nose tingled for several minutes afterward.

And the next morning, when Dolly, astonished at the delay, finally peeped into the bath-room, scissors in hand, she found Charles-Norton fully dressed, his coat on.

"Why, Goosie," she said in surprise; "I haven't clipped you yet!"

"No?" he growled enigmatically.

"Take off your coat, dearie," she went on.

"And you're not going to," said Charles-Norton, finishing his statement with complete disregard of hers.

Dolly stood there a moment, looking at him with head slightly cocked to one side. "All right, Goosie," she said cheerily. "Only, don't get mad at poor little me. Come on to breakfast, you big, shaggy bear, you!"

"I don't want any breakfast," growled Charles-Norton between closed teeth (as a matter of fact, he did, and a fragrance of waffles from the kitchen was at the moment profoundly agitating the pit of his being). "I don't want any breakfast—where's my hat—quick, I'm in a hurry—good-by."

And tossing the hat bellicosely upon his head, he pulled to himself the hall door, swaggered through, and let it slam back on his departing heels, right before the astonished nose of his little wife.

She remained there before this rude door, examining its blank surface with a sort of objective curiosity. At the same time she was listening to the sound of steps gradually diminishing down the five flights. She shook her head; "the bad, bad boy!" she said.

She pivoted with a shrug of the shoulders and went back to the kitchen and sat down at the table, all set for breakfast. She took up her fork and cut off a bit of waffle. She placed it in her mouth. Her eyes went off far away.

It took it a long time, this little piece of waffle, to go down. Lordie, what a tough, resilient, flannelly, bit of waffle this was! Suddenly her head went forward. It lit upon the table, in her hands. A cup of the precious blue ware, dislodged, balanced itself a moment on the edge of the table, then, as if giving up hope, let go and crashed to the floor at her feet in many pieces. She gave it no heed. Her head was in her hands, her hands were on the table, her hair lay like a golden delta among plates and saucers; and the table trembled.