Ralph Williams, on the weekdays, saw to the upkeep of his rental properties. And he sold a small apartment house that had been on his meager list for more than fourteen months. His own commission from the transaction was negligible, but his chief profit was in his own view of himself: it made of him once again a man of affairs. He took pleasure in the most tedious details of the deal, and when it was concluded he even took the seller and the purchaser downtown and bought them lunch in a hotel. At this lunch, Ralph himself swallowed nothing more substantial than a shrimp cocktail. He drank a good deal of liquor, however, and when the party broke up, his spirits were such that he was unable to locate his automobile. After searching the streets for more than an hour, he finally arrived home in a taxi and headed straight for the telephone. Annabel was unable to dissuade him. Nor was Ralph to be contented with a mere report of the situation to the Police Department. Among the calls he put in that afternoon were three to various officials at the City Hall, including the City Attorney himself, and one to the City Desk of the Plain Dealer. To each of these gentlemen in turn, he enumerated the ghastly dangers implicit in their flagrant indifference to the crime wave that was sweeping Cleveland. The next day the police located the car for him, on the street where he had parked it and the whole affair caused no one any serious trouble. But Ralph was back in business; and the following week he started to clean out his old file cabinets.

Annabel attended with renewed pleasure to her household duties. It was in her nature to be a good housekeeper. She liked making lists and paying bills, and the sound of a vacuum cleaner was no mere nuisance to her ear: it gave her comfort. On long afternoons alone, rather than let time go stale on her hands, she wrote lengthy letters to Bernice O’Brien or attended matinees at the Cleveland Playhouse; and sometimes she made popsicles out of Kool-Aid and passed them out among certain pint-sized friends she had newly cultivated in the neighborhood.