“I am tired, Dick,” she said. “Have you got a car anywhere around?”
“I can phone for it in two shakes,” he said. 281 “Here in this ice-cream parlor. Can I buy you a cone while you’re waiting?”
“Buy cones for that crowd of children and I’ll watch them eat them. Doesn’t that little girl in the pink dress look like Sheila, Dick?”
She sank down on a stool in the interior of the candy shop and rested her elbows on the damp marble table in front of her, splotched and streaked still with the refreshment of the last customer who occupied the seat there and watched the horde of dirty clamorous street children devouring ice-cream cones and cheap sweets to the limit of their capacity.
“I didn’t know you believed in this promiscuous feeding of children between meals,” Dick said, when she was settled comfortably at last among the cushions of his car, which had arrived on the scene with an amazing, not to say, suspicious promptness.
“I don’t,” Nancy said, “in the least; but I don’t really believe in the things I believe in any more.”
“Poor Nancy!” Dick said.
“I’ve had some trouble, Dick. I’m shaken all out of my poise. I can’t seem to get my universe straight again.”
“I’m sorry for that,” he said. “Anything I can do?”