Rope’s End - “A Burglar's Christmas”
One burglar affirms: "I guess we are at our rope's end, sure enough. How do you feel? The other retorts: "Pretty shaky. The wind's sharp tonight. If I had had anything to eat I mightn't mind it so much. There is simply no show. I'm sick of the whole business. Looks like there's nothing for it but the lake." The tête-à-tête designates that the two men are confronting a quandary. They cannot access food; being at a “rope’s end” purports that the their breathes are at the inception of cessation since nutritional deprivation could activate starvation-linked demise.
Model Pupil - “The Bookkeeper's Wife”
Percy Bixby’s predilection for regularity is corresponding to that of an unimpeachable observational apprentice: “Percy liked regularity: to get his work done on time, to have his half-day off every Saturday, to go to the theater Saturday night, to buy a new necktie twice a month, to appear in a new straw hat on the right day in May, and to know what was going on in New York. He read the morning and evening papers coming and going on the elevated, and preferred journals of approximate reliability He got excited about ball-games and elections and business failures, was not above an interest in murders and divorce scandals, and he checked the news off as neatly as he checked his mail-orders. In short, Percy Bixby was like the model pupil who is satisfied with his lessons and his teachers and his holidays, and who would gladly go to school all his life.” The emblematic ‘model pupil’ paints Percy Bixby’s concrete expectedness. His life is methodical to the degree that the endeavors of each month could be seamlessly mapped out in advance. Superficially, the evenness renders him a superlative ‘bookkeeper’ who would not disremember bringing records up-to-date.
