The mattress Annie and Walter were to use had been pushed beneath a little window. Walter walked around the room naked, his expression malicious. Annie undressed down to her pants and brassière, looking uneasily at the open doorway to the main room. The lights went out.

They struggled for a few minutes, she and Walter; flesh struck flesh. Walter’s hand gripped her between her legs. “Oh, stop!” she whispered. “They’ll hear us!” “What do you think they think we’re doing?” he whispered back angrily. But he fell asleep at last, his back against hers.

She heard sleepers’ breathing from the next room. Walter snored delicately. Annie lay inert, feeble with exhaustion. Watcher’s fatigue, she told herself. If only she wouldn’t watch people so much! The least change of their expressions, the slightest shift of their bodies, threads on their clothes, holes in their shoes, stains on their fingers, their dangerous and unpredictable glances, nose pickers, tooth suckers, cheek scratchers, aroused in her a macabre and anguished response! But to what? To what!

Suddenly she heard the sound of singing. Raising herself carefully on one elbow so as not to awaken Walter, she looked down. Four people stood beneath a street lamp singing “Silent Night” to the darkened windows of MacDougal Street.

They had coffee with the Lighters in the morning. Walter was sullen, and Elmira, apparently piqued by his lack of response, began to question him belligerently about when he was going to work again. “I’m shipping out,” he answered her snappishly.

Just before they left, Jersey handed her a piece of paper. “It’s something I copied down a long time ago. It’s a description of a painting of Giotto’s, the Annunciation, I think.”

She must have looked startled. “I don’t know,” he said, looking quickly back to Elmira and Walter, who were speaking in low voices near the drawing table. “I thought you might like it—a kind of Christmas present.” He smiled suddenly. “You’re nice,” he said. “Too nice for Vogel.”

She put the scrap of paper in her handbag, her eyes on Jersey’s face. “Thank you,” she whispered. It had been a secret transaction.

She arranged with Walter to meet him later in the afternoon at a restaurant on Twelfth Street and Sixth Avenue, then she hurried off, uptown. On the subway, she took out the scrap of paper. It read: “An angel has entered by the door and knelt. In the silence between the andirons and the sideboard, the destiny of the world is to be decided.”

She read it several times. How beautiful! How mysterious! Why had Jersey given it to her?

But she began to worry about money—the destiny of the world had little enough to do with her.