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and aglow.
    When she opened the door he was standing a little way back on the landing at what her mother would have called ‘a respectful distance’, and she smiled and said: ‘You must have gotten up really early to be here by now.’ ‘That’s right,’ hesaid gravely – he was always grave when he saw her – ‘I guess it was six o’clock or so. It’s pretty interesting around then, you know,’ he went on hurriedly, as if this getting up early were a mark of light-mindedness, ‘I mean, there are fellows in suits waiting for the streetcars and you wonder where it is they’re going.’ ‘I suppose there are all kinds of things people have to do,’ she said. ‘That’s right,’ he said, and then, tired of all this abstract talk, ‘How are you, Ruthie?’ ‘I’m very well,’ she said. ‘I almost didn’t get the day off, but then Mr Lonigan remembered he owed me for that Saturday I had to go in back in the fall so I guess everything worked out.’ ‘I guess it did,’ he said. He was wearing the blue-and-white striped jacket and the flat straw boater that made him look like just a little like one of the soda-jerks at the fountain in Pennsylvania Square, and he had a brown paper parcel in his left hand that contained his bathing things. Back in the apartment she could hear her mother moving round the kitchen, the noise of a kettle being filled, the thump of a cat being evicted from a chair. Somewhere in the distance a door slammed shut.
    ‘Why don’t you come in and have some breakfast?’ she said. ‘You must be hungry if you got up at six.’ ‘Don’t let me put you to any trouble,’ he said. He had taken off his straw boater and was twirling the brim anxiously around his forefinger, and his Adam’s Apple stuck out of his throat like a tomahawk. He lived way over on the East Side in one of the new projects and she had met him at a dance given by the Young Women’s League of St Francis. ‘Oh, it’s no trouble,’ she said, smiling suddenly at the promise of the day before them, the thought of Wabash Avenue and its summer crowds,girls and their dates flocking into the streetcars, and he caught something of the excitement in her voice and came almost blithely through the apartment door to stand in the vestibule shaking imaginary specks of dirt off his shoes and look benevolently at the clutch of umbrellas and her father’s ulster and the piled-up boots that her brothers had left there, as if this profusion of objects accorded with every idea he had ever possessed of domestic comfort. She could not take him into the parlour, for it was full of dressmakers’ samples, laid out anyhow over the sofa and the chairs, and so she led him into the kitchen, which was full of steam and heat and the smell of baking soda, where her mother looked up from the stove and said, ‘Is that you Huey? Gracious but it’s early.’ Mrs Christie did not like Huey. She had tried to, but she could not manage it. She said there were too many Catholics and the APA had the right idea. And Huey, knowing this, was frightened of her.
    It was going to be a hot day, for the Fourth of July flags, not yet taken down from the drug store that ran along the front of Mr O’Hagan’s building, drooped listlessly towards the street, and the air coming from off the lake through the open window was warm and full of grit. ‘Huey, how are your folks?’ her mother asked as she handed out the cups of coffee, and, looking round the tiny kitchen, with its faded poster advertising the Chicago Grand Exposition, the grocery list pinned up on the cupboard door, the cat gone to ground in its basket, she saw that it was exactly the same as it had always been and that not even the introduction of Huey could lend it novelty. Huey was nervous with his coffee. He blew on itssurface to cool it, spilled some of it onto his saucer and then poured the liquid that had spilled back into his cup, and all the while Mrs Christie watched and judged him. Later,