title: The Rattling Window
author: Catherine Staples
description: Catherine Staples grew up in Dover, Massachusetts, spending summers in Virginia and on Cape Cod. Her poems and reviews have appeared in <em>Blackbird</em>, <em>Prairie Schooner</em>, <em>The Southern Review</em>, <em>Commonweal</em>, <em>Third Coast</em>, <em>The Michigan Quarterly Review</em>, <em>Southern Poetry Review</em>, <em>Rattle</em>, <em>Prime Number</em>, and <em>Quarterly West</em> among other magazines. Her chapbook <em>Never a Note Forfeit</em> (Seven Kitchens Press, 2011) won the Keystone Prize. She teaches in the Honors program at Villanova University and lives with her family in Devon, Pennsylvania.
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  * * *
  
  # Pyramus And Thisbe
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### By Henry James
  
  
  
  
  
    
  
  This page copyright © 2004 Munsey's.
  
  
  http://www.munseys.com
  
      
  
  Etext by Ian Hillman
  
  
  Persons:
  
  
  _
  
  
    
  Stephen Young
  
  
  _ (33), Journalist. _
  
  
    
  Catherine West
  
  
  _ (26), Teacher of Music.
  
  
  (Miss West's apartment; plainly but comfortably furnished; a few
  
  
  prints and photographs on the walls; a sofa, a piano. Enter Catherine,
  
  
  in walking-dress, with a roll of music in her hand.]
  
  
  CATHERINE. Dear me! this dreadful smell of tobacco again! When it
  
  
  doesn't come in one way, it comes another; when it isn't the door it's
  
  
  the window. There he sits at his own window, puffing his great pipe. I
  
  
  saw him as I crossed the street. And the wind always our way. I'm
  
  
  always to windward of that pipe. What's a poor girl to do? ( _Shuts
  
  
  her window with a loud crash._) There! perhaps he'll hear that! What _
  
  
  am_ I to do? I can't go to my lessons smelling like a bar-room; and
  
  