JANE: I’ll get up an’ fix you a cup of hot milk. That’ll quiet you down maybe.

[Moony grumbles incoherently. Jane pads softly onstage, into the kitchen. She is amazingly slight, like a tiny mandarin, enveloped in the ruins of a once gorgeously-flowered Japanese silk kimono. As she prepares the hot milk for Moony, she pads about the kitchen in a pair of men’s felt bedroom slippers, which she has a hard time keeping on her small feet. She squeezes the kimono tight about her chest, and shivers. Coughs once or twice, glances irritably at the alarm clock on window-sill, which says nearly four o’clock in the morning. Jane is still young, but her pretty, small-featured face has a yellowish, unhealthy look. Her temples and nostrils are greased with Vick’s Vap-o-Rub and her dark hair is tousled.]

JANE [strident whisper]: What for? I’ll bring yer milk in. [Sound: scraping of furniture and heavy footsteps.] That’s it, be sure you wake the kid up—clumsy ox!

[Moony appears in the doorway, a strongly-built young workingman about twenty-five years old. He blinks his eyes and scowls irritably as he draws on his flannel shirt and stuffs it under the belt of his corduroy pants.]

It’s that beer-drinkin’. Makes gas on yer stomach an’ keeps yuh from sleepin’.

MOONY: Aw, I had two glasses right after dinner.

JANE: Two a them twenty-six ounces! —Quit that trampin’ around, for Christ’s sake! Can’t you set still a minute?

MOONY: Naw, I feel like I got to be moving.

JANE: Maybe you got high blood pressure.

MOONY: Naw, I got a wild hair. This place’s give me the jitters. You know it’s too damn close in here. Can’t take more’n six steps in any direction without coming smack up against another wall. [Half grinning.] I’d like to pick up my axe and swing into this wall—Bet I could smash clean through it in a couple of licks!

JANE: Moony! Why didn’t I marry an ape an’ go live in the zoo?

MOONY: I don’t know. [Jane pours the steaming milk into a blue cup.]

JANE: Set down an’ drink that. Know what time it is? Four o’clock in the morning!

MOONY: Four o’clock, huh? [He continues to move restlessly about.] Yeah. Soon ole fact’ry whistle be blowin’. Come on, you sonovaguns! Git to work!—Old Dutchman be standin’ there with his hands on his little pot-belly, watchin’ ’em punch in their cards. “Hi, dere, Moony,” he says. “Late agin, huh? Vot you tink dis iss maybe, an afdernoon tea?” That’s his joke. You know a Dutchman always has one joke that he keeps pluggin’ at. An’ that’s his. Ev’ry morning the same damn thing—

JANE: Yeah? Well—

MOONY: “Ha, ha, Moony,” he says, “you been out star-gazin’ las’ night! How many vas dere, Moony? How many stars vas dere out las’ night? Ha, ha, ha!”— [Strides over to the window—flings it up.]

JANE: Put that back down! I ain’t got a stitch a clothes on under this.

MOONY: I’ll say to him, “Sure, I seen ’em las’ night. But not like they was in Ontario, not by a long shot, Mister.” Grease-bubbles! That’s what they look most like from here. Why, up in the North Woods at night—