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Now, nothing is more exciting than the discovery of a genius, and nothing is easier to recognize than a voice. One merely needs to listen to it. A singer, only four years from stardom, is surely a musical find, especially when he carries piano technique as a kind of sideline, which both Helva and Rex assured us that he did. Would he" sing for us? He would and did, in a weak baritone appropriate to some understudy of a village choir, presiding at a funeral in the absence of the tenor. His mild melody he accompanied with three shaky chords, in which he was occasionally able to employ his left hand profitably, but more often not. A change of bass note was too great a strain on his virtuosity. But his poise throughout this entertainment was magnificent. For some moments we doubted which of us had lost our minds. We pictured the bewildered Chaliapin in his forced interview, gazing at the singer with a dazed stare, while he penned his testimonial to get rid of him.

Such was Rex. Punctilious in manner, elegant in speech, armed with all the lingo of the artist, more than ready to exhibit a voice which he did not possess, accompanied by quavering notes which he called piano-playing, Helva gazed at him like an adoring but tone-deaf dog. His performance was meaningless to her, but so was all music. His must be better than the rest because he said so. She pretended to no expertness beyond her stove, but with a dry smile made the comment: "Rex knows my business better than I know his. If the coffee is less than seventy-five cents a pound he knows it and throws it out."

II

Needless to say, if a lady enjoys the luxury of an ornamental husband well enough to feed him like a king at her expense she has a right to do so without interference. And all might still have been as happy as in the Wild Duck's attic before reform set in if Helva could have kept in Normalcy herself, while Rex enjoyed his delusions across the border.

But unfortunately she had her own reasons for hovering near Neurotica's sultry clime. Helva had suffered in her childhood from the periodic rages of a drinking father, who had often attacked her mother in her presence. His violence had been accompanied by loud and profane boasts of his infidelities, and had so frightened the child that she had become dizzy from terror, and fainted. She recalled that before she lost consciousness the first time she had noticed a spool on the table slowly revolving, and that was how she knew she was fainting. All this was years ago. But now that Mattie like a snake had entered her Eden, the fainting was renewed. Helva had accepted Rex's artistic refusal to work, either at his art or at anything else, with philosophic composure. His support was a small price to pay for such an elegant companion. But when she demurred at feeding two idle persons he became extremely irritable, even vindictive, in temper, and teased her with faultfindings, and jokes about Mattie's charms.

He finally took to calling her not Helva, but by the first syllable alone. "Hell, Hell," he would shout at her maliciously when she made protests, and would insist that he had only called her by her name. Suddenly a spool on the table began to whirl and Helva fainted. From then on she fainted frequently, and since ladies demonstrating in shop windows must not fall into their puddings, it looked as if she were going to lose her job. We promised to relieve her of the expense of Mattie's upkeep. Then, with some hesitation at venturing to criticise such perfection, we turned to tell Rex a few things that he needed to know. However, when he found that he had been summoned for a scolding rather than for a musical engagement, as he had fondly supposed, his interest and his fine manners died out together. As he truly remarked, we had nothing "on him," and he left abruptly, with Helva swaying slightly in his wake.

What next? Obviously a job for Mattie was essential, and one not taxing to a mind that functioned neither wisely nor well. Curiously enough, two lines of work dear to the mentally infirm are those involving the safety or destruction of hundreds of human lives, namely, running an elevator and driving a truck. Since Mattie could not aspire, on account of her sex, to the greater glory of slaughtering pedestrians, she yearned for the minor hazards of the elevator shaft. So she applied for an elevator job in a certain office-building in which we had come to have an interest because of our dealings with Maida, one of the clerks.

But on application to Maida we found that she had just left her job under a cloud. To be exact, she had forged a check for $93.86 on her employer, and had disappeared disguised as a man. The news did not come wholly as a surprise, for persistent purchases beyond one's means are certain to lead to trouble sooner or later. And Maida, despite excellent wages and a head adequate to disburse them, had been involved in a "crush" with Rose, a stack girl in the library, which involved an almost complete buying out of the florist after every squabble.