'"
Miss Schump turned to her first customer of the day, the flush receding
as suddenly as it had come to scorch.
"Copper toes for the little boy? Just be seated, please."
Thus did the odor of romance lay for the merest moment upon the stale
air of Miss Schump's routine.
Evenings, in the high-ceilinged, long-windowed, and inside-shuttered
little flat in very West Thirteenth Street, tucked up in the top story
of one of a row of made-over-into-apartments residences that boasted
each a little frill of iron balcony and railed-in patch of front lawn,
they would sit beside an oil-lamp with a flowered china shade, Mrs.
Schump, gnarled of limb and knotted of joint, ever busy, except on the
most excruciatingly rheumatic of her days, at a needlework so cruel, so
fine that for fifteen years of her widowhood it had found instant market
at a philanthropic Woman's Exchange.
Very often Miss Cora Kinealy, also of the children's shoes, would rock
away an evening in that halo of lamplight, her hair illuminated to
copper and her hands shuttling in and out at the business of knitting.
There were frank personal discussions, no wider in diameter than the
little circle of light itself.
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