Newman glanced once toward the corner, and like one who had been hurt unfairly and is ironically at the mercy of an inferior world, he brought his shoulders up in a helpless shrug and shook his head mournfully. Carlson turned and with his brows tightening as though he were in rapid thought, stared again at the old man at the end of the block. Newman faced toward the old man again. For a long time he stood there comfortably watering his lawn with his glasses on.

At nine o’clock Sunday morning he discovered himself standing in the middle of his bedroom looking around and trying to remember what he had come upstairs for. Everything was becoming hard to remember. Yesterday he had spent the whole morning trying to get himself to go to a movie but the illegitimacy of sitting in a movie house during working hours turned him away. Only last night had he realized that he had forgotten to eat lunch. Now he stood blinking at a sunbeam pouring onto the rug and at the thought of tomorrow his face began to heat. Church bells outside …. He turned happily and went downstairs. This was something he had to do, a place he had to be. Every Sunday he went to the corner and got his paper. The world became real again.

He had hardly reached the sidewalk when an impression of strangeness slipped upon him. Something had happened on the street. He knew it. Perhaps a dog had been run over. Something had died, it seemed. All the air had been sucked off the street, nothing moved, the sun shone yellow and hot. He walked glancing. Then looked down at his denims to see if they were buttoned. Then he saw Mrs Depaw. She was not watering her lawn.

She always watered her lawn when it was this hot. There she was standing on her porch dressed in white as always, and looking like an old nurse. And in perfect stillness she was watching the corner. The pavement in front of her house was dry.

He crossed the street and continued toward the candy store, and as he mounted the curb he saw it. Three men were standing on the corner a little beyond the newsstand at which Finkelstein sat. They were looking … they were looking at Mr Newman as he approached. His heart squeezed painfully as he damned himself for having forgotten to take his glasses off. For it was Fred there, and Carlson and …

On and off – perhaps two Sundays out of five – this little sharp nosed man standing with Fred and Carlson had stationed himself on the opposite side of the street from Finkelstein’s store, and sold newspapers from a pile which he kept on the sidewalk. Mr Newman had never paid any attention to him except once, several months ago, when he observed to himself that the city ought to prevent transients from competing unfairly with a storekeeper, who had to pay rent while the transient kept all his profit. He was against pushcart peddlers for the same reason.