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quite early and the speakeasy was empty. The bartender served him and went back to his newspaper.
    On the mirror behind the bar hung a poster advertising a mineral water. It showed a naked girl made modest by the mist that rose from the spring at her feet. The artist had taken a great deal of care in drawing her breasts and their nipples stuck out like tiny red hats.
    He tried to excite himself into eagerness by thinking of the play Mary made with her breasts. She used them as the coquettes of long ago had used their fans. One of her tricks was to wear a medal low down on her chest. Whenever he asked to see it, instead of drawing it out she leaned over for him to look. Although he had often asked to see the medal, he had not yet found out what it represented.
    But the excitement refused to come. If anything, he felt colder than before he had started to think of women. It was not his line. Nevertheless, he persisted in it, out of desperation, and went to the telephone to call Mary.
    “Is that you?” she asked, then added before he could reply, “I must see you at once. I’ve quarreled with him. This time I’m through.”
    She always talked in headlines and her excitement forced him to be casual. “O. K.,” he said. “When? Where?”
    “Anywhere, I’m through with that skunk, I tell you, I’m through.”
    She had quarreled with Shrike before and he knew that in return for an ordinary number of kisses, he would have to listen to an extraordinary amount of complaining.
    “Do you want to meet me here, in Delehanty’s?” he asked.
    “No, you come here. We’ll be alone and anyway I have to bathe and get dressed.”
    When he arrived at her place, he would probably find Shrike there with her on his lap. They would both be glad to see him and all three of them would go to the movies where Mary would hold his hand under the seat.
    He went back to the bar for another drink, then bought a quart of Scotch and took a cab. Shrike opened the door. Although he had expected to see him, he was embarrassed and tried to cover his confusion by making believe that he was extremely drunk.
    “Come in, come in, homebreaker,” Shrike said with a laugh. “The Mrs. will be out in a few minutes. She’s in the tub.”
    Shrike took the bottle he was carrying and pulled its cork. Then he got some charged water and made two highballs.
    “Well,” Shrike said, lifting his drink, “so you’re going in for this kind of stuff, eh? Whisky and the boss’s wife.”
    Miss Lonelyhearts always found it impossible to reply to him. The answers he wanted to make were too general and began too far back in the history of their relationship.
    “You’re doing field work, I take it,” Shrike said. “Well, don’t put this whisky on your expense account. However, we like to see a young man with his heart in his work. You’ve been going around with yours in your mouth.”
    Miss Lonelyhearts made a desperate attempt to kid back. “And you,” he said, “you’re an old meanie who beats his wife.”
    Shrike laughed, but too long and too loudly, then broke off with an elaborate sigh. “Ah, my lad,” he said, “you’re wrong. It’s Mary who does the beating.”
    He took a long pull at his highball and sighed again, still more elaborately. “My good friend, I want to have a heart-to-heart talk with you. I adore heart-to-heart talks and nowadays there are so few people with whom one can really talk. Everybody is so hard-boiled. I want to make a clean breast of matters, a nice clean breast. It’s better to make a clean breast of matters than to let them fester in the depths of one’s soul.”
    While talking, he kept his face alive with little nods and winks that were evidently supposed to inspire confidence and to prove him a very simple fellow.
    “My good friend, your accusation hurts me to the quick. You spiritual lovers think that you alone suffer. But you are mistaken. Although my love is of the flesh flashy, I too suffer. It’s suffering that