on the faintest of breezes.

They stood for a long moment, facing each other until he turned slowly and stepped forward. Gretchen continued walking beside him with her hand upon his arm. They crossed the street and at last were near her rooming house. She looked up at the falling snow against a gray sky; the tangle of branches above them; the misty pools of light beneath the gaslights. She glanced at his serene face, turning, though she continued to walk.

"I believe you almost kissed me back there, did you not Professor?"

"So, it's 'Professor' again, is it?" He smiled the faintest of smiles and looked away down the street. "Miss Haviland, you did not ask to be kissed—back there." She turned quickly in front of him to catch his gaze, so that he had to stop. "Not in so many words," he added, "I mean—you hesitated as much as I."

"Fancy that," she replied with a laugh, and began walking again, swinging her legs gaily, letting her skirt billow.

He touched her hand, draped over his forearm, and she felt the warmth of his fingers through her glove. They walked on beneath bare branches and quietly falling snow. It seemed far too warm for snow—tropical almost, as if the gaslights were warming the whole scene—the whole world. Winter was about to melt—the sun might even rise the next instant and spring would return in a blaze of gold and green with soft rain, the scent of flowers.

"In future, perhaps I _shall_ ask, Professor." She leaned to grip his arm more tightly and whispered. "Perhaps I shall."

THE HUNGARIAN LIGHTBULB

When the symphony orchestra collapsed in ruin after years spent floating, half-dead near bankruptcy, all the musicians were thrown out of work. At that time nearly everyone was out of work anyway—many of them discovered soup-kitchens and soon found employment at menial tasks. A few—the lucky or the talented, but mostly those with both luck and talent—found other musical work well below stevedore's wages.

Jurgen had tremendous talent but no luck, yet he could not imagine any other life than being a violist. He would not look for non-musical work—everything was unsuitable, and certainly unattractive. He took the little savings he had and went West thinking to find a place less crowded with hungry musicians. Rather than spend his money on transportation he settled on a romantic adventure: he made friends around the freight yards and rode the rails west until he arrived on the outskirts of a comfortably large city with a clean look—and there he decided to make his home. The city was familiar to him, as a professional musician: it boasted a fine orchestra whose conductor, one Laurence Lamonte, frequently found shockingly intimate details of his flamboyant life splashed across the pages of the tabloids.

In River Street, on the wrong side of the tracks, after hours spent walking from the fashionable districts gradually down the economic ladder into a grimy, dilapidated neighborhood, Jurgen found the Charleston Residence Hotel. Brownstone, four stories tall, it had two windows boarded up on the third floor and unmistakable blackened marks from a conflagration that had never been cleaned away. There was a sign in the window advertising a weekly fee he thought he could manage—if the sign was not out of date. It was yellow, curling at the edges, and could hardly be read behind a smudged window laced with years of accumulated cobwebs. It did not seem like a wholesome place—but the price was right so he walked into the tiny lobby.

"Have you any rooms?" he asked. He had his viola case tucked under one arm and his cracked leather valise dangling from the other hand.

A short, bearded and balding man in a brown, pinstriped suit that might once have been new, stood at the front desk. The stub of a stale cigar not two inches long was stuffed between his lips. He cupped a hairy hand to his ear.

"I asked," Jurgen stated in a much louder voice, "whether you have a room to let."

"Yeah, we got a lot of rooms." The man grinned. "How many you want?"

"One will be sufficient, thank you." Jurgen carefully laid out one week's rent on the counter. "This is a week in advance." The man cupped his hand to his ear, and Jurgen was compelled to repeat himself loudly.

The man swept the money away—into a vest pocket—and handed his new resident a rusty key attached to a length of twine. Scrawled on a paper tag attached to the twine were numbers: a three, separated by a dash from the number thirteen.

"By the way," Jurgen inquired loudly, leaning forward, "you don't mind if I PRACTICE the VIOLA during the DAY?"

"Violin?" the man yelled back, with a dismissing wave. "Just so I don't get no complaints, you do what you want."

Relieved at last to be in some lodging—his last few nights had been spent in damp freight cars, cowering with one or another group of indigents—Jurgen ascended the stairs quietly to the third floor. Room thirteen was the last door on the right at the front of the building. He opened the door after some fumbling with the key. His room proved to be the one with boards on the windows. Only one window, on the left, was not boarded. The inside had been freshly painted, with white paint. The floor was painted a deep gray and partly covered with a threadbare carpet patterned mostly in shades of brown.

Jurgen fumbled for the light switch and pushed it with a loud click. A single bulb glowed dimly, suspended from a long wire in the center of the room. He thought that was par for the course. At these rates, he could not have expected much more. Setting down his valise, he thought he would be in better lodgings uptown, as soon as he found work. He laid his viola case reverently across the raw, wooden arms of the room's single chair. In the far left corner was a single bed. It had no sheets, but a few worn blankets folded neatly at the foot of the mattress. Along the opposite wall stood a sink with a cracked mirror hanging above it, a flush toilet with a broken ceramic handle, and a closet door—again with a broken handle. No towels. Putting his valise upon the bed, Jurgen went back down the stairs to see about sheets and towels.

"This is a residence hotel," the proprietor told him, pushing back the few hairs on his head with one hand. "Sheets in the hall closet at the far end—towels too. Maid comes once a week. Toss your sheets and towels down the chute on Tuesday morning. Don't use too many."

"Thank you," Jurgen replied, making a sincere effort at politeness. He went back up and got a set of sheets and a towel, then made his bed.

Afterwards, he sat on the edge of the bed and opened his valise. It contained underwear, a well-used black suit with tails, a silk shirt, a silk hat, soap and shaving kit, and sheaf after sheaf of printed music. Everything else he had sold as necessary; his cash was securely fastened around his waist in a money-belt. He wondered if there were a trustworthy bank in the neighborhood. Tomorrow, he decided, he would have to go look.

Jurgen surveyed the room carefully before turning in. On the back of the door a relatively new calendar was posted with two thumb tacks. It featured a blonde woman with exquisite, long legs and a coquettish smile—advertising a well-known brand of chewing tobacco. It was the fourteenth of November, he noted. Fifty-seven years ago to the day, his grandmother had arrived in New York harbor from Hungary, dragging two young children behind her—with less money in her pocket than he had. He pondered her memory for a moment—she had been his first musical mentor—then went to switch off the light. He laid down on the bed beneath fresh cotton sheets and listened to the far-off sounds of the city—automobiles and trains, mostly—until he fell asleep.

Early in the morning, just after sunrise, Jurgen practiced the viola quietly for an hour or so. He had no clock, but when he judged, by the sounds in the street