“About a year and a half.”
“I never noticed,” she said, and there was pain in her voice.
“Oh, well,” he said soothingly, “there’s always a jam going up and down when you do, and you are tired evenings.”
“But you are in the jam, too, and you are tired as well as I, but you have seen.”
“That’s my job,” he said complacently. “I got to know the folks in our building.”
“How much do you know about me?” she pursued with morbid curiosity.
He grinned at her again, companionably. “You’re twenty-five years old, and you’re stuck on that fellow Inglish, with Morrow and Mayne over at the Holland Building. You used to live with your aunt up on Thorn Street, but she died and you got the house. B. T. Raines is your brother-in-law, and he’s got two kids, but his wife is not as good-looking as you are. You stayed with them two months after your aunt died, but last week you got a bunch of your beaux, soldiers and things, to build you some steps up the outside of your house and now you live up there by yourself. Gee, I’d think you’d be afraid of pirates and Greasers and things coming up that canyon from the bay to rob you—you being just a woman alone up there.”
Eveley gazed upon him in blank astonishment. “Do—do you know that much about everybody in our building?” she asked.
“Well, I know plenty about most of ’em, and some things that some of ’em don’t know I know, and wouldn’t be keen on having talked around among strangers. But of course I pays the most attention to the good-lookers,” he admitted frankly.
“Thank you,” said Eveley, with a faint smile. Then she flushed. “What nerve for me to talk of assimilation,” she said. “We don’t know how to go about it. We have been asleep and blind and careless and stupid, but you—why, you will assimilate us, if we don’t look out. You are a born assimilator, Angelo, do you know that?”