In the Still of the Night by Dorothy Salisbury Davis Page B

Mrs. Ryan said proudly.
    “Theater people are the most generous I’ve ever begged from. I am a beggar, you know,” Justina said with a simplicity that touched Mrs. Ryan to the core. There was something luminous about her. She spoke softly, her voice throaty and low, but an educated voice.
    “The Franciscans—I always give to the Franciscans,” Mrs. Ryan said. It was the only begging order she knew.
    “I feel closer to St. Francis myself than to any other saint,” Sister Justina said. “Sometimes I pray for a mission among birds and animals, and then I’m reminded that pigeons are birds, and that rats and mice must have come off the ark as well as the loftier creatures. But I think I do my best work among the poor who ought never to have come to the city at all. They are the really lost ones.” She was sitting at the foot of the daybed, rubbing her hands together. The color had risen to her cheeks.
    Mrs. Ryan thought of tuberculosis. “Don’t you have a shawl, Sister?”
    “I’m warm enough inside, thank you. I have so many calls to make, would you think it ungrateful of me to run off without waiting for tea?”
    Or Sheila Brennan, Mrs. Ryan thought. But she had grown accustomed to visitors finding her apartment both claustrophobic and too warm. “The electric plate is terrible slow,” she said, making an excuse for her guest’s departure.
    “You’re very kind,” the nun said. Her eyes welled up. “God bless!” She gathered a shopping bag in each hand and went flapping down the hall like a bird that couldn’t get off the ground.
    A few minutes later Mrs. Ryan was downstairs again, about to resume her trip to the Seminal Thrift Shop. She lingered near the elevators until Louis went outdoors to look for a cab for one of the tenants with liquid assets, as Sheila Brennan liked to say of the coop owners. She was not in the mood for a lecture from Louis, who couldn’t stand street people, even if they belonged to a religious order. She was almost to the corner of Ninth Avenue when a gust of wind came up, whirling the dust before it. She turned her back, and so it was that she saw Sister Justina emerge from the service or basement entrance of the Willoughby. She clutched her veil against the wind and hurried toward Eighth Avenue, the opposite direction from Mrs. Ryan. And without her shopping bags.
    Julie had the feeling that Mrs. Ryan had been waiting for her—not exactly lying in wait, but keeping an eye out for her to appear, either coming to or going from her ground-floor apartment on Forty-fourth Street. Theirs was a friendship of several years, recently broken and more recently mended. Julie still kept the tin box of dog biscuits in case the old lady appeared one day with another Fritzie in tow.
    Mrs. Ryan came halloing across the street ahead of a rush of traffic. “Do you have a few minutes, Julie? There’s something I need your advice on.”
    Julie had a few minutes. She was of the conviction that a gossip columnist hustled best who hustled least. Her visit to the rehearsal of Uptown Downtown could wait. She unlocked the door and led the way back into her apartment-office.
    “Do you remember the day we put down the deposit here, Julie?”
    Julie remembered, but it seemed a long time ago, her brief sortie into reading and advising. Sheer mischief, she’d say of it now. Now “the shop,” as she’d always called it, was comfortable to live in and equipped as well with the electronics of her trade. She had learned to use the computer and rarely went near the New York Daily office at all.
    “Friend Julie,” Mrs. Ryan said, her voice lush with reminiscence. Then: “You have such good instincts about people. I want to tell you about a nun I met this morning, a beautiful person, the most spiritual eyes you ever saw.” Mrs. Ryan didn’t exactly proselyte, but she did propagate the faith.
    “I’m not great on nuns,” Julie said, and the phrase “a nun and a neck” popped into her mind. Where