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THE NARROW HOUSE

BY

EVELYN SCOTT

AUTHOR OF "PRECIPITATIONS"

BONI AND LIVERIGHT

PUBLISHERS NEW YORK

1921

     _"Love seeketh only Self to please_,
        _To bind another to its delight_,
      _Joys in another's loss of ease_,
        _And builds a hell in heaven's despite_."
                                   --WILLIAM BLAKE

THE NARROW HOUSE

PART I

The hot, bright street looked almost deserted. A sign swung before the
disheveled building at the corner and on a purple ground one could read
the notice, "Robinson & Son, Builders," painted in tall white letters.
Some broken plaster had been thrown from one of the windows and lay on
the dusty sidewalk in a glaring heap.

The old-fashioned house next door was as badly in need of improvements
as the one undergoing alterations. The dingy brick walls were streaked
by the drippage from the leaky tin gutter that ran along the roof. The
massive shutters, thrown back from the long windows, were rotting away.
Below the lifted panes very clean worn curtains hung slack like things
exhausted by the heat.

Some papers had been thrust in the tin letter box before the clumsy dark
green door, and as Mrs. Farley emerged from the house she stopped to
glance at them before descending to the street. One of the papers had a
Kansas City postmark and she thought it must have come for her husband
from a certain woman whom she was trying to forget. She placed the
papers clumsily back where she had found them.

As she passed down the stone stairs she stooped to toss a bright scrap
of orange peel to the gutter. She sighed as she did it, not even taking
the trouble to brush the dust from the shabby white cotton gloves she
wore. Her skirt was too long behind and as she dragged her feet across
the pavement it swept the ground after her. She glanced into the place
which was being repaired and wished that something might be done to
improve her home. At any rate now that her daughter-in-law, Winnie, had
become reconciled to her parents things would be better. Mr. and Mrs.
Price were rich. They had a carriage and an automobile. Mrs. Farley told
herself that it was because of her grandchildren that the end of the
long family quarrel brought some relief. Winnie's two babies, a girl and
a boy, would now enjoy many things which the Farleys had not been able
to provide. Mrs. Farley thought of them going to church in Mrs. Price's
fine carriage. Mrs. Farley knew that she should have taken the part of
her son, Laurence, who had been responsible for the disagreement, but
somehow it had been impossible to condemn Winnie. The poor girl was not
strong. Laurie was a harsh man. He was stubborn. He did not forgive
easily and would suffer everything rather than admit himself in the
wrong. He had been like that as a youth. And idly, as one in a boat
allows a hand to trail along the silken surface of the water, the woman
allowed her mind to drift with the surface of long past events. She had
reached the butcher shop; had almost gone by it.

"How do you do, Mrs. Farley? Nice warm weather we're having." The
butcher had a hooked nose and when he smiled it seemed to press down his
thick brown mustache that framed his even white teeth so beautifully. He
settled his apron over his stomach and gazed at her hungrily and
affectionately above the glass top of the counter as though he were
trying to hypnotize her into buying some of the coral pink sausages
which reposed beside a block of ice in the transparent case.

The meat shop was as white as death. It smelt of blood and sawdust and
its tiled interior offered a refuge from the heat without.

"I want a piece of--can you give me a nice rib roast today--? No! What
do you ask for those hens?" Mrs. Farley, as always, hesitated when she
spoke and lines as fine as hairs traced themselves on her pale, dry,
hastily powdered forehead. Her vague, rather squinting eyes traveled
undecidedly over the big pieces of meat: the shoulders, the forelegs,
the haunches, of different shades of red streaked with tallow or suet,
that swung on hooks in the shadow against the gray-white tiling of the
walls. The fowls dangled in a row a little to the fore of the meat. The
feet of the hens were a sickly bluish yellow, and the toes, cramped
together yet flaccid, still suggested the fatigue which follows agony.
The eyes bulged under thin blue-tinged lids and on the heads and necks
about the close-shut beaks bunches of reddish brown feathers had been
left as decorations. The butcher took one down and, laying it on the
counter, pinched up the plump flesh between his forefinger and thumb.

"You could never find a better fed hen than that," he told her. "Nice
firm solid meat. You see they are just in and I was so sure of getting
rid of them I did not even put them on the ice yet. They're not storage
fowls. I buy them from a young man who has a farm out near where my
sister lives at Southbridge."

Mrs. Farley, in spite of a gala occasion and the fact that Mr. and Mrs.
Price were to do her the condescension of coming to dinner at her house
the next day, had not intended to buy anything so expensive as chicken.
For all those people it would take two hens. But though she tried her
best not to allow the butcher to catch her eye, she knew he was staring
at her intently and that the white teeth were flashing almost cruelly
under the brown mustache beneath the hooked nose. It heightened a
conviction of weakness which she never failed to experience when she was
called upon to decide anything, especially in the presence of other
people, and she wished she had asked Alice to buy the meat before she
went to work. Of course Alice would spend too much but what she got was
sure to be nice and the diners were certain to praise it.

"I will take two of the hens," said Mrs. Farley, moistening the dry down
along her lips. "Be sure you give me fat ones," she went on, frowning.
While she fumbled in the pocketbook for the money she did not cease to
be aware of the pleasant confident manner of the butcher, as with deft
fingers he ran his hand into the bird and with a slight clawing sound
tore out a heap of discolored entrails so neatly that not one burst.
Then he slit the chicken's neck and extracted its crop. Mrs. Farley was
anxious to get away. She never had any peace of mind except when she was
by herself.

"I'm sure you will be pleased," declared the butcher with a slight bow,
as he took the money she handed him. Her short white hand was corded
with bluish veins and her fingers were slightly knotted and bent from
gout. They had hovered almost palpitantly over her worn black purse
while she tried to make up her mind whether to give him the exact amount
or to ask him to change the five dollars which Alice had turned over to
her that morning. At last she gave him the five dollars, and when he
counted the sum due her into her palm the dull brightness of the pieces
of money swam slightly before her eyes and she had no idea whether or
not the amount returned to her was what was owing.

The butcher bowed again, managing to appear deferential. "Where shall I
send them?" he asked, inclining his ear toward her, and in a low hurried
voice she recalled the number he had forgotten. "They must be sent right
away," she insisted, "or I can't get them ready." With a gallant
inclination of the head the butcher promised to send them at once.

She made her way through the bitter-smelling gloom and as she pushed the
screen door open a large blue fly rose stupidly and bumped against her
face.

She was obliged to go to the grocer's and to the bakery and when she
approached her home again it was already three o'clock in the afternoon.
May, Winnie's little girl, an unhealthy looking child with lustrous
wax-like skin, large, vapid, glazed, blue eyes, and thin, damp curls of
gray-blonde hair which clung to her hollow shoulders, rose from the
shadowed doorstep.

"Hello, Grandma," she called, with one hand smoothing the front of her
faded pink gingham dress, while with the other she pressed her weight
against the grimy iron balustrade.

Mrs. Farley's eyes frowned wearily but a conscientious smile came to her
lips that were twisted a little with repugnance.

"Where's Mamma, May?" she asked, not looking at the child. "Is she lying
down?" May sucked her middle finger and wagged her head from side to
side. Her smile was vacant in its timorous interest. "Do you want to
take one of my bundles?" May nodded her head up and down and accepted
the parcel. Her small arm twined around it loosely. The front door was
ajar, opening into a familiar smelling twilight, and she hopped after
her grandmother into the house.

As Mrs. Farley entered the darkened bedroom, Winnie, in a cheap, fancy
négligé of lilac and pink, rose from an old corduroy-covered lounge and
came forward to meet her. Winnie's small, pointed face was haggard and
smeary with tears. She gazed at her mother-in-law with a childish look
of reproach.

"O Mamma Farley, I know Laurie will say some terrible thing again!" She
wrung her hands that were plump through the palm and had tapering
fingers which curved backward at the tips. "I have been lying here all
afternoon worrying about what may happen tomorrow!" As she spoke she
glanced beyond her mother-in-law's head to the heavily beveled mirror in
the old bureau, and her rapt, tragic face became even more voluptuously
tragic as it contemplated itself.

"Now, Winnie, I have talked to Laurence and he realizes perfectly well
that he can't say what he thinks to your father. He will let bygones be
bygones just like the rest of us."

"O Mamma Farley, you don't know Laurie! And he hates Papa and Mamma so
and he has no mercy on me. Sometimes I think he hates me, too!"

Mrs. Farley's mouse-gray hair hung in straight wisps below the edge of
her shiny old black velvet turban which was tilted askew. Her withered
face became harshly kind. She had more firmness when she was with Winnie
than in the presence of other people.

"You must remember, Winnie, that I have known Laurie considerably longer
than you have. Pull yourself together and rest and don't worry about
this any more. I know it will be all right."

May had followed her grandmother and now stood awkwardly and
apologetically on one foot watching the two women. When her mother
glanced at her, her face quivered a little. She looked at the floor and
rubbed the scaled toe of her slipper against the raveled blue nap of the
carpet.

"I am going to make a cake today." Mrs. Farley sighed as she turned
toward the door. "There's my usual Saturday baking, too. You'd better
keep still so you won't be feeling worse tomorrow. If I get through in
time tonight I'm going to press your yellow dress for you. I want you to
look pretty." She left the room.

Winnie was not sure that she wanted to look pretty. She was a little
ashamed of the feeling but she would have liked to create with her
parents the impression that the Farleys had not treated her well. This
was from no desire to injure the Farleys but rather from an intuition as
to what kind of story of the past years would please Mr. and Mrs. Price
most and present their daughter in the most interesting light.

May, sidling reluctantly toward the hall, still watched her mother.
Winnie's eyes, with soft, hostile possessiveness, fastened themselves on
her little girl's face. May would have preferred not to meet her
mother's eyes so straight.

"Come here, May!" Winnie sank suddenly to her knees and held out her
arms. May walked forward, seeming not able to stop herself.

"You love Mamma anyway, don't you?"

"Yes," May said. There were bubbles of saliva on her lips because she
would not take her finger away from her mouth.

"_You_ don't think I'm selfish, May?" Winnie shook May a little, then
held the child to her. A shudder ran like a live, uncontrolled thing
between them.

May was ashamed of the shudder as if it had been her fault. Winnie drew
away and stared at her daughter. Winnie's eyes were soft and wistful
with hurt, but underneath their darkness as under a cloud May saw
something she was afraid of. It was angry with itself and demanded that
she give it something. She did not know what to give it. To escape it
she wanted to cry.

Winnie wanted to make May cry but hated her for crying.

"You _must_ love me, May! I'm your mamma! You must love me!"

"I do," May said. Her eyes were black with tears, but because she wanted
to cry she could not keep her lips from smiling a little.

"As well as you love papa?"

May felt accused of something. She could not make herself speak. She was
sorry and wanted her mother to strike her.

"Then you love Papa best? Oh, May, that's cruel! You mustn't love him
best!" Winnie's excited manner was contagious. May did not know how to
explain what was the matter and suddenly burst into tears. Winnie moved
back again and watched the little girl with her arm over her face,
crying.

May's sobs lessened. Without knowing what had occurred, she felt utterly
subjugated. She wanted to love her mother, but the soft, angrily
caressing eyes would not let her. When would her mother let her stop
crying? There were no tears any more. It was hard to cry without tears.

"Poor naughty Mamma doesn't know what she's done!"

May, with her eyes shut, stole out a hand which trembled on her mother's
face.

"You do love me then? May, you must! You mustn't love Papa best!"

"I don't!"

They kissed. May saw that her mother's eyes were like things standing in
their own shadows and loving themselves. They liked being sad. They
yearned over May's face, but it was as if they did not see it and were
yearning for themselves.

"Go play with Bobby then, dear, and don't hurt poor Mamma like that."

"I won't."

May ran out and left Winnie looking into the glass beyond where the
child had been. Winnie could not understand how she could be blamed for
anything. She was so innocent, so childlike. At one time Laurence had
been able to discover no faults in her. She recalled the early months of
their marriage and remembered that in those days whenever she had reason
to think him displeased with her she made funny little pictures of
herself with her hands over her eyes and, signing them "poor Winnie,"
left them under his plate at table where he found them at the next meal.
A pang of hatred shot through her, mingled with the recollection of
caresses, involuntary on his part. She felt a need for justifying her
increasing hardness of heart and when she regarded herself sadly in the
mirror she was reassured. It was as if in the way her tousled reddish
curls shot back the light there was something that contradicted blame.

It was four o'clock. Through the window the sunshine on the row of
houses opposite paled their red bricks to the purplish tint of old rose
petals. At the end of the street where the square began bunches of raw
green foliage floated with a heavy stillness above the smutty roofs
steeped in light. Behind the bright yellow-green leaves the blue sky
melted into itself as into its own dream.

Laurence came home early on Saturdays and Winnie decided to dress. As
she opened the front of her négligé Bobby entered the room and made her
hesitate. He sweated and panted, dragging his feet and lugging with both
hands a small tin bucket filled with the dirt he had dug in the back
yard. He was very fat. He wore overalls and there was dirt smeared in
the creases of his neck under his firm chin.

"Bobby! How can you!"

"Dirt. Nice dirt," Bobby explained. Everything about him showed that he
belonged to himself. His brown eyes were passively against his mother.
Grunting laboriously, he stooped and began to empty the rich purplish
earth on the clean-swept blue carpet. Winnie's eyes flashed.

"Don't you dare do that, Bobby!" She sprang toward him, trying to be
angry.

He did not mind. He kept his fat shoulders bent to his task.

"Stop it, I say!" Only a few grains of the damp, dark soil remained in
the bright bucket. She gripped his elbow. He glanced at her, his solemn
eyes twinkling with a kind of placid malice. His grasp on the tin
handle relaxed and he sat down very flat on his plump bottom. Winnie
dropped down beside him and began to laugh. She could not have said why
but she always felt flattered by his defiance.

"Now what shall I do?" she demanded. They stared at each other.

"I'm makin' a house," Bobby said. There were still harsh lights in his
placid eyes. They made her ashamed and glad that she was his mother. Her
heart beat very fast and, escaping from an emotion which perplexed and
disturbed her, she threw her arms about him and buried her face against
his cool ear and his moist, cool cheek. "Oh, you love me! You love me! I
know you love me!" she crooned, rocking him against her. "You love me as
well as you do Papa, I know you do."

Bobby wriggled. "Don't love Papa!" he said.

"But you must! You know you must." There was a sob in Winnie's voice.
She was sick, she said to herself. That was why she wanted to be loved.

"'Don't love Papa!' You must love Papa, but love Mamma, too! Oh, Bobby,
poor Mamma!" Bobby tried to pull away again, but she had felt some one
looking at them and she would not let him go. Bobby's breath was warm on
her half bare breast.

She turned her head, guilty, and ready to cry with hatred of her guilt.
Laurence was in the doorway. She knew he had hesitated there, but when
she looked at him he walked straight forward past her with the air of
having only just arrived.

"Hello," he said. "Glad you are up."

"Look what Bobby's done." She let Bobby go.

"Into mischief as usual, eh?" Laurence said. He walked to the wardrobe
and hung up his hat. He had a short, bulky figure, the head and
shoulders too big for the rest of him. He had thick brown hair, coarse
and very slightly sprinkled with gray. His skin was ruddy but did not
look fresh. As he walked with his swaying, awkward stride, he held his
head forward and a little to one side. His coat sagged on the hips and
was caught up toward the back seam. His hands did not appear to belong
to him. They were short, disproportionately small, and very delicate.

"Bobby, you should be made to clean up," Winnie said.

Laurence came over and looked at the pile of dirt. "May----" was all
Bobby said. He wanted to get away from his father. He ran out.

"He's made a mess, all right. Can I help you up?" Laurence leaned to her
and she gave him her weak hands. She wanted him to feel them weak in
his. His mouth twitched a little as he pulled her to her feet. She hated
the furtive bitterness that was in all he did for her, yet it struck a
self-righteous fire from her. She leaned against him. She was frail and
plaintive. He seemed to stiffen against her softness. She loved herself
wistfully, her eyes lifted to his face.

To marry her he had given up the prospect of a career in science. An
expedition to Africa with one of his old professors had been abandoned.
At that time he had finished college and was working for a scientific
degree. She was eighteen.

Winnie felt herself still to be good, pretty, and sweet. She had a right
to something beside this distant tenderness. She knew there had been
times when simply a look, a glance, a word from her had carried him off
his feet. After these occasions there were symptoms of self-contempt on
his part. Yet he was proud of her, she was certain. Often, without his
being aware of it, she had seen him betray to others a secret vanity in
possessing her. Surely it was no disgrace to yield to her!

She had sometimes caught him staring at her abstractedly, yet with such
unyielding curiosity that it made her shiver to remember it. She clung
to him so that he could not look at her like that now.

"Do you feel well enough to dress for dinner?" Laurence asked.

"Yes, Laurie--I'll feel all right if----"

"If what?" He was always harsh when he joked.

She twisted the button of his coat. His eyes narrowed against hers as
though he were shutting her out. His sweet, harsh lips smiled. He gave
her a kiss and moved out of her arms, going to the window.

She was ill. The doctor had advised another operation. Without it she
could have no more children. She would die. She looked at Laurence. He
hurt her. The line of his back against her forced her into herself. It
was a pain. But when she remembered what a serious state of health she
was in most of her bitterness passed away from her. An expression of
sweetness and resignation came into her face. Her gray-green eyes shone
in tears under her reddish, disheveled hair. In her illness she felt
superior to her husband and was able to love herself more completely.

"I heard from Mamma today again, Laurence," she began gently.

"Yes?" Laurence had hesitated before replying. She wanted him to turn
round. He kept his gaze fixed on the street beyond the open window. A
soft current of motion stirred the bright heavy air blue with whirling
motes. She could see his hair slowly lifted. Past his head the sky was
pale with light. The sunshine floated green-white from the dim quivering
sky.

She kept watching his shoulders in the sagging coat. "I believe you had
rather see me miserable all the rest of my life! Oh, Laurence, how can
you! I can't hurt Mamma any longer even to please you!"

"To please me?" Laurence's voice was sharp and sarcastic, yet it did not
reproach. She hated its tolerance.

"Of course I know I can't please you!" she said. She could not see his
face and it was almost unbearable not to know whether he was smiling or
not. She felt him going farther away from her because of her mother. It
was cruel. Now whenever he did not want to touch her he said she was
sick. She hugged her sickness but she hated him for talking about it.

"Now, Winnie!" He was facing her. "I've tried to efface myself as much
as possible as regards your parents. If you weren't nervous and ill you
would realize that the time has passed for reproaching me."

"Forgive me."

"There's nothing to forgive."

She was irritated because he would not forgive her, but she went to him
and laid her head against his coat. A tremor shot through him when she
touched him and she did not know whether she was agitating him in a
manner complimentary to herself or not. But something in her hardened.
He had no right to conceal himself.

"Oh, Laurie!" They were still against each other. She felt him waiting
for her to lift her head. When people married they became one. She was
conscious of feeling cruel, but it seemed to her that she had nothing to
reproach herself with. "I cut myself on my manicure scissors today. You
mustn't be stern with me." He could not help thinking what a common
deceitful-looking little hand she had. He was sorry for her.

"What a tragedy!" His lips rested on the finger an instant without
giving themselves. They quivered a little. An emotion that was
unpleasant and at the same time exhilarating swept through her and
seemed to lift her from her feet. She thought sadly and complacently of
how much she had suffered for him already.

"Where is May?" Laurence asked suddenly. He felt that in kissing
Winnie's finger he had committed himself to some unknown almost sinister
thing. He resented the stupidity of his thought.

"Downstairs, I suppose." When he talked of May, Winnie was glad to leave
him. She felt as if he were lying to her.

Laurence moved toward the door, his gross body large in the darkening
room. Winnie seemed to know each detail of him as he passed into the
dark hall. It was painful to know him so distinctly. She tried in vain
to revive the blurred apperception of him which she had had in earlier
days. She wanted people to see him as she had seen him then. His rocking
walk humiliated her and when visitors were present she tried to inveigle
him into sitting in an armchair where his heavy handsome profile would
be silhouetted against the light, his awkward body at rest.

I don't think it is right for him to show an exaggerated preference for
one child, she told herself. He doesn't love May! He exaggerates his
feeling for her out of pique. Winnie could not forgive him for being
kinder to May than she was.

She found a match. Among the shadows the invisible sun made patches of
bronze light. In the dark the match flared like a long soft wound of
flame. The gas rushed out of the jet with a thick hiss and the flame
spread into a fan. It was a wing covered with yellow down, blue at the
quill. The wind sucked at it soundlessly.

She walked to the window which the gas flame had already made dark. The
sky was green-blue. Bunches of black leaves on the trees in the square
cut the dim fiery horizon into twinkling segments. A telegraph pole rose
up like a finger higher than the houses and appeared to lean heavily
against the quiet beyond. Behind flecks of cloud putrescent stars shone
as through flecks of foam on an enchanted sea.

Winnie pressed her head against the cold pane. Laurence, herself, old
age. She would never be happy. A peaceful vanity took the place of her
unrest. She realized an ethereal quality in herself which coincided
with the whiteness of her little hands. She was aware of her hands,
delicate and precious against her breast. Her breathing tightened. She
did not want to remember the ugliness of the long illness she had had
and to think of the operation which threatened her threw her into a
panic. When people talked too much to her of death she only saw
something ugly which she did not understand. She wanted to get away from
it. She felt that she should not be forced to think of death. It did not
belong to her. If people only loved her and allowed her to be herself
she gave everything.

She turned away from the window and walked back to the mirror.

Alice was the last to reach home for dinner. She closed the front door
briskly after her. Its thud was muffled and at the same time emphasized
by the quiet of the empty street behind it. She whistled as she took off
her hat. The tramp of her feet toward the dining-room was like a man's.

"Hello, Mamma Farley. Hello, Laurie! Glad to see you down, Winnie." She
tweaked Bobby's ear.

"Hello, Aunt Alice!" His voice was thick. Like a small amused Buddha, he
looked at her.

May thought Aunt Alice was not going to notice her, but Aunt Alice
patted the little girl's head. May was terrified and relieved when the
big hand brushed her hair heavily. She smiled at Aunt Alice, but Aunt
Alice did not see her. Then her face grew stupid with perplexity again
and her eyes were like two dark bright empty things; and under her
frilled apron, though she tried to hold her chest in tight, you could
see her heart beat.

Mr. Farley, who had been upstairs, was the last to enter the
dining-room. When Alice saw him her homely rugged face lit with
peremptory condescending affection and she said, "Come and sit by me
this minute, Papa Farley. Your soup is cold. What do you mean by being
so late?"

Mr. Farley was always embarrassed by Alice's officious regard, but he
would not permit himself to become impatient. He was a large handsome
man ten years younger than his wife. His hair was prematurely white.
There were heavy lines at the corners of his mouth and one deep fold
between his brows, but otherwise his face was smooth and fresh. His lips
were compressed continually into a smile. He veiled his disconcerted
rather empty blue eyes under defensively lowered lids. He gave a quick
glance around the brightly lit table.

"Winnie's improving. That's good."

"Yes. You look better," Alice observed to her sister-in-law. Winnie made
a little moue as she met the cheerful but accurate scrutiny of Alice's
eyes. Winnie felt aggrieved by this clearness of gaze. In resenting it
she pitied Alice, who had coarse sallow skin and large hands and feet.

"Winnie has every reason to be better. Her father and mother are coming
to dinner with us." Mrs. Farley's conversation was always studiedly
general. Her voice was weak and toneless and a little harsh, but she
spoke carefully with an agreeable intonation. While she talked, her
stubby uncertain hand grasped the hilt of a long horn-handled knife and
the thin flashing blade sunk into the brown crusted beefsteak, so that
the beautiful wine-colored blood spurted from the soft pink inner flesh
and mingled with the grease that was cooling and coating the bottom of
the dish. She laid fat brown-edged pieces of pink meat on the successive
plates which she removed from a cracked white pile before her. The
boiled potatoes were overdone and burst apart when she tried to serve
them. On the thin yellow skin which hardened over their mealy insides
there were greenish-gray spots.

"I'm glad, Winnie. We're all glad. No grievance is worth hugging like
this." Mr. Farley held his hand to his eyes but he spoke determinedly.
They all knew how hard it must be for him to accede to a meeting with
Mr. Price. Laurence, Alice, and Winnie thought of the unkind things
which Mr. Price had said about their family scandal at the time of the
break, and wondered if he would refer to it again.

Mr. Farley liked to do hard things. If his resolution hurt him he kept
it and was not afraid of it. He was comfortable in the bare cheaply
furnished dining-room because he felt that if he had desired happiness
he might not have been there; and as he was very punctilious in his
duties toward his wife he was able to relieve the oppressive sense of
sin which he had carried with him during most of his life.

Winnie and Alice were both watching Laurence. His face was bitterly
impassive. On a former occasion he had insulted Mr. Price. His present
resignation was full of disgust. Winnie felt that he was giving her to
her mother.

"You're not eating, dear. I let the children stay up because you were
feeling better. I thought we would celebrate." Mrs. Farley's eyelashes
were whitish. She carried nose glasses fastened to a gold hook on the
breast of the black waist she had washed herself and ironed so badly.
She squinted when she smiled, yet her eyes did not look glad, but tired.

"I'm trying, Mamma Farley." Winnie's sweet mouth was tremulous. She was
glad to feel it tremulous. How could Laurence give her over simply
because her heart would not let her refuse her mother any longer?

Alice cut her beefsteak with brisk emphatic strokes. She took big bites
and chewed them with an air of exaggerated relish. She felt herself to
be the one person in the world who understood Laurence, but she knew
that he feared and resented her understanding. He had always been
saturnine and had lived his life alone. At college he paid his own way
until he won a medal which entitled him to a scholarship. After this he
devoted himself to research work in biology. Alice's imagination had
never quite encompassed his impulse in marrying Winnie and it was still
more difficult to understand why Winnie had committed herself. Even in
the days of courtship Winnie had often fled in tears from her lover. She
was ashamed of his deliberated vulgarities, though they piqued and
invited her. Alice could not comprehend it. Winnie and Laurence had
been secretly married. When the Prices commanded their daughter to leave
her husband, Laurence had withdrawn from the decision and told her to do
as she liked. She had not been able to make herself leave him. She did
not know that she wanted to. Her parents had cut her off. Ten months
later May was born. Laurence took his scientific knowledge to the
laboratory of a manufacturer of serums and began to make a living.

"I used up most of your five dollars on some hens today, Alice." Mrs.
Farley's conscience was heavy with the sudden silence at the table. It
merged into her own inner silence and became the voice of herself from
which she was anxious to escape.

"Good."

"You work so hard, Mamma Farley. Don't!" Winnie, not wanting Mamma
Farley to work, felt sad and nice again and justified before Laurence.

"I'm used to it." Mrs. Farley's mouth puckered in a prim tired smile.
The mouth was satisfied with itself, so it drew up like that.

"Don't deprive Mamma of the joy of martyrdom, Winnie," Alice insisted,
laughing shortly. Mrs. Farley kept her withered lips smiling, but her
eyes, dull and confused with resentment, felt covertly and bitterly for
her daughter's face. Alice ate, oblivious. Mrs. Farley, with physical
irritation, felt Alice eating beefsteak and swallowing it half chewed.

"You leave Mother alone, Alice. Expend your benevolent energies
somewhere else." Laurence, his lip twitching with repression, stared
hard and smiling into Alice's eyes. Her eyes were a sad brown, a little
dull. They were quiet eyes staring back unreproachfully as though they
understood the pain of his. Laurence had a constant unreasoning impulse
to defy Alice.

"Thanks," Alice answered with tired sarcasm.

"I don't need any one to look after me, Laurence," Mrs. Farley said, her
voice cheerful, her mouth wry and tight, her lids drooped.

Mr. Farley was restless. "Your mother is right. We must give Mr. and
Mrs. Price a royal welcome tomorrow. We must put ourselves in their
place. There are two sides to everything and it takes a great deal of
determination to make the first overture. They've done that. Now it's up
to us." Mr. Farley was always afraid that the incipient quarrel between
Alice and her mother would develop plainer proportions. He did not see
the group about him clearly, but a helpless smile was on his face. In
terror of their unkindliness he showed them how noble he was.

There was another silence. Mrs. Farley could not bear it.

"Has Mr. Ridge decided when he will leave for Europe, Alice?" Mrs.
Farley's knife and fork in her weak hands clattered against her plate.

Alice was silent a moment. "He won't leave before next month," she said.
She was very intent on her food. A flush went across her forehead like a
burn half under her stringy brown hair. Laurence gave her a quick
half-pleased glance of involuntary inquiry. Winnie stared at her with
soft sharpness.

"Does the doctor think his eyes will get well?" Mr. Farley asked, too
clouded with his own concerns to be aware of the tension in Alice's
face.

"He hopes so. It is nervous strain and overwork mostly. There was some
sort of infection, but that came as a result."

"Then you'll have a vacation. He can't take you to Europe."

"No," Alice said almost angrily. "I know where I can get green things
cheap, Mamma. That market on Smith Street."

"I see where Ridge has been attacked by all his radical friends. He
seems to have most of the world down on him for that last book." Alice
would not see Laurence's sneer.

"He's too good for all of them," she said sharply.

Winnie pursed her mouth. It was an effort not to laugh. To see Alice
show feeling for a man like Ridge made one hysterical.

Mr. Farley was not thinking of Alice or of Horace Ridge. Again and
again, as if in spite of himself, he allowed his gaze to rest on Winnie.
His daughter-in-law disturbed him and if he could avoid it he never
looked her in the eye. If he could keep from noticing the throats and
breasts and arms of women he was usually all right. Then if he were
obliged to see them clearly he wanted to weep with the pain of it and
when tears again blurred his vision he was relieved. Marriage had been a
failure. There had been, he felt, terrible things in his life. Sex had
invariably placed him in the wrong, so sex must be the expression of a
perverse impulse. Tainted, as he considered it, like other men, he
struggled to exalt himself into a vagueness in which particular women
did not exist.

Winnie despised him, but she would not admit it to herself.

"I'm so glad to see you better! So glad!" Mr. Farley repeated
irrelevantly, uncomfortable because he felt the sweetness of Winnie's
face too intimately.

"Thank you, dear Papa Farley." Winnie laid her hand gently on his big
fist resting on the table. He withdrew his fingers, but as he did so
gave her hand an apologetic pat. Her little fingers felt to her like
iron under his big soft hand. She knew he was afraid when she touched
him. Vulgar old man, she said to herself. She despised him so that she
wanted to touch him again out of her superiority. "Dear Papa Farley!"
There was helpless moisture in his eyes which he could not keep from
her.

"I have some work today. I'll forego dessert." Alice got up with sudden
awkwardness and pushed her chair back. She smiled at them all, not
seeing them.

When she had gone they were pleased and yet ashamed of themselves,
knowing why she went.

"Did you get your deal through, Father?" Laurence asked impatiently
after a moment. They were all relieved of the silence too heavy with
Alice.

The window was open and the thick dark night, coming warm and moist into
the bedroom, made Alice feel as though some one breathed into her face,
close against her, stifling her. The yellow gas flame rushed up from the
jet with a stealthy noise. The street outside was still.

Alice sat down before her typewriter and stared at it. Suddenly her full
breasts heaved. "Oh, my God!" She buried her face. Her blouse pulled
tight across her shoulders as she stretched her arms in front of her.

Horace Ridge was going to Europe to remain two years. He might get well.
He might die. His eyes. She felt herself lost in the darkness of his
eyes.

Then something broke in her. I'll tell him. I'll go with him.

She dared not see herself in the glass opposite. Once she had abandoned
herself to her desire to be beautiful. She remembered, with a horrible
sense of humiliation, the hours spent behind locked doors when she had
tried to make herself into something men would like. One day she had
done her hair a new way, and, going into the living-room, had caught
Laurence's ridiculing eyes upon her. That was before he married Winnie.
Alice realized that something had gone wild in her. She had picked a
paper knife from a table and hurled it at him and it had cut his hand.
His face had turned scarlet, then white, then scarlet again. He had gone
out as if he were glad, without speaking to her.

After that she fixed her hair the old way and avoided the mirror. She
did not want to realize what she was. Nothing existed but work.

When she met a pretty woman in the streets Alice had a sense of
outrage. A self-righteous flame burnt in her. Then she tried to be
patient and it grew cool. She wore heavy careless clothing. She was
generous to Winnie. Most of all it relieved Alice to buy presents for
the children.

It was the evening before when she came home from work that Bobby met
her in the hall. Then there was jam on his unperturbed face. "You donna
bring me sumpin'," he reminded her.

She held out a top. For an instant a cold gleam of possession lit
Bobby's still eyes in his fat face. He grasped the top and moved a
little away from her. His air was suspicious. When he was sure the top
was his the cold light died from his face. He was smooth and shut into
himself again. He was like a china baby. To get at his soul one needed
to break him.

"You like it, eh?" Alice demanded. Her eyes were more violently hard
than his. She seemed to like him against her will. She bent down. His
lips brushed her cheek dutifully and she felt as though a mark had been
left there. She imagined it a spot like frost with five points like a
leaf.

"Tan I go?"

As he went away from her the spot burned her.

Inexorably Bobby descended to the back yard. He seemed to know how
futile a thing Alice was compared to himself.

With her face buried on the oilcloth cover of the typewriter Alice's
thoughts, all confused, ran on God, art, suggestions that had come to
her as Horace Ridge dictated his book. Then in the turmoil she could
see Horace Ridge's big figure still against the light of the window
where he worked. Alice felt herself light, clear and vacuous, absorbed
in the substantiality of this picture.

Christ died on a cross. She felt sick as with disgust. Good to others.
Hate. Winnie.

Alice could not bear to think of the children born of Winnie. Bobby born
of Winnie. She could not think of him. Virgin Mary. There seemed
something secret and awful in maternity--some desecration. She felt the
child helplessly intimate with the mother's body. He did not want her.
Other religions. No time to read up. Buddha. Sex. Marriage. Laurie was
an atheist. He wanted to be perverse.

Must be something. Nice pictures. Art. Beauty.

When she said beauty to herself her heart was hard with resentment.
Long-haired men. Rot. They did not understand.

She cried a few moments thinking of nothing, but it was as if something
unseen grew strong with her weakness. It drank her misery and left her
dry. She got up, feverish, and stood before the glass, hating herself.
Her waist had pulled apart in front and she saw the swell of her big
firm breast. Her face was heavy and ugly with rebellion, sallow, the
eyes inflamed.

She saw her breast. Strange shiver of curiosity about herself. Why did
it hurt her to see her breast? She covered it up.

She looked at herself, into her hot eyes. Something cried inside her for
mercy, but she would not take her hot angry eyes from the face in the
glass. No use to beat about the bush and pretend to be highfalutin'.
Wanted what Winnie wanted. Disliked Winnie. She had a corroding
sensation in her throat as though she tasted metal. Then shame mounted
hot over her as though it were swallowing her. She resisted being
swallowed. Her skin quivered against the hot cold engulfing sense of
degradation. She was like a bird alive in a snake's body.

Something tightened in her soul, and the emotion she had experienced the
moment before flowed away from her. Receding, it left a hardened
accretion like petrifying lava flowing down cold from a volcanic crater.

Still she stared at herself. Homely woman. It seemed to her that her
veins crept like snakes along her arms. Life stealing upon one through
the veins. Stealthy life running red and silent in its bitterness
through the body. Where to go to? Horace Ridge. He has any woman he
wants. Famous man. Me.

She felt slightly intoxicated by a frank acknowledgment of her
absurdity. Her horror of herself crept over her body, shameful because
of no use.

I can't endure it!

Her wrist pressed against her teeth and made a mark, but no blood came.
She wanted to tear away her flesh, but it seemed to resist her. It was
full of hurt where her teeth had pressed. Life sucked at her like a wild
beast.

She turned from the mirror and hurled herself face downward sobbing on
the bed. Her body oppressed her.

She cried a long time. The work would have to go. At last she crept off
the bed and undressed herself and put out the light, but she lay awake,
and the darkness remained electric and horrible. She closed her eyes and
tried to shut out its intimacy.

Mamma and Papa Farley. What was wrong between them? Sex. Horror. She
tried to keep her thoughts from integrating. Child. She bit her wrist
again and turned over in bed. Too proud to hate Winnie. Other girls.
Their faces opened against hers. They were white and flowering in the
dark. Eyes open, waiting to receive men. She shivered. One must think
about these things. Winnie's maternity. Bobby seemed slimed all over
with Winnie. To wash Bobby clean--clean of Winnie!

Alice was still awhile. She was dark inside, but the dark grew calm. She
began to go over things very clearly. What was passion? Fourteen years
old. Pain. Words written on back fences.

I am glad to be out of it. Poor little Winnie.

Outside, cool. Cool ache of being outside life.

Horace Ridge's settled form, quiet against the dancing window. He turned
in his chair. Kind eyes behind glasses. He could keep people outside him
because he had all they could give him already there behind brown agate
eyes.

Albert Price--short trousers, face like a girl's. They knew.

She, twenty-nine years old, outside their lives. She did not want her
body. If she could only make Horace Ridge understand that she had no
body! Clothes made her virgin when she was a mother. If she could
undress herself he would know that she was a mother. Clothes made him
forty-three years old, radical critic of life and manners, ruined
health, blindness incipient. She wanted to undress him to show him how
little he was.

Oh, dear! She cried. It hurt, but less. Oh, dear! Life was a muddle.
When one ceased to desire there was quiet, bitter and beautiful quiet.
Laurence, Winnie, Mamma and Papa, far away from her--pathetic with
distance. Horace Ridge far away from her. Her loving him cool. Nothing.
She wanted nothing. Heart in the breast coolly melted like water in a
still cup. In the bed in the darkness her still heart reflected the
shadows of hot summer pavements, brick houses with fronts beaten flat
and dull by sun, the moment before nightfall when lights burst from the
theater fronts and the streets were gay with people in pale colored
clothes. Then the heart was still, was cool--was water into which the
darkness came gratefully covering the loneliness.

Alice was sorry for herself because she had a mother like Mrs. Farley.
Poor Papa Farley. Alice loved him and despised him. She did not love her
mother.

On Sunday when Alice went downstairs Mrs. Farley had on her gray taffeta
dress and was intent on setting the house right. She walked stooped a
little forward, her shoulders drawn together. The eyeglasses that hung
on her chest twinkled. Short straight soft hairs floated, unpinned, at
the nape of her neck. When she turned her head the withered skin made
fine swirls of wrinkles about her throat. She walked very fast about the
parlor putting the chairs in place. She took short steps so that her
haste appeared feverish. The occasion seemed to fill her with a kind of
worried happiness.

Mr. Farley had put on his frock coat. He had no dignity in it.

"Don't work too hard, Mother." He went into the dining-room smiling in
bland anticipation of whomever should be there.

Alice was at table. She was ashamed of her red eyes and barely glanced
up. "What would Mamma do if we forgot for one day to object to her
working so hard?"

Mr. Farley spread his coat-tails and sat down on the oak chair with the
imitation leather seat. Alice's remarks about her mother made him feel
guilty.

"We should have gotten up earlier so your mother wouldn't have the
dishes to worry about."

"I'm going to wash 'em," Alice said shortly.

It was a hot day. The clouded sky was a colorless glare. A thick wind
stirred the ragged awnings upstairs before the bedroom windows. For a
moment the sun came out as though an eye had opened. The house fronts
were a pale bright pink. Dust made little eddies in the empty Sunday
street. The awnings lifted, then hung inert like broken wings. When a
wagon passed you could hear, above the rattle of the wheels, the
muffled thud of the horse's feet striking the soft asphalt.

May was on the front steps. She wore a very stiffly starched white dress
and a pink sash, wilted and wrinkled by many tyings. Her hair was
brushed back very smooth and gathered away from her forehead with a
flapping bow. Pale with interest, her small face turned toward the
corner of the square as she watched for the Prices to come.

In the parlor, Winnie stood out of sight behind the freshly laundered
curtains, and watched too. Laurence had left the house. She wondered if
he were going to avoid her parents.

As the time passed the sun disappeared again and shadows flowed into the
street which was as gray and still as water.

When the equipage with shining lacquered sides flashed into the empty
place May looked at it bewildered, but Winnie had seen it through the
window and recognized her parents.

The carriage drew up before the house and the wheels scraping the curb
made a long rasping sound. The chestnut horses were fat. Their harness
twinkled. They wriggled the stumps of their clipped tails against the
cruppers that constrained them. On their breasts where the circingles
had rubbed and on their flanks and buttocks the hair was darkened and
matted with lather.

May was afraid and proud because the beautiful horses stood before her
home. They stamped. A shiver ran along their satin bellies. Their
breasts and forelegs quivered with tension as they jerked their heads
in the check reins and pressed the street with harsh hoofs below their
rigid ankles. Watching them, May uttered a little cry of terror and
delight; but she thought some one had heard her and she clapped her hand
over her mouth.

The footman had jumped from his place, and Mr. and Mrs. Price were
descending from the carriage.

Indoors, Winnie felt her heart swell with a pain of pride. These were
her parents. All these years she had been robbed of this!

"Oh, Mamma Farley! They've come! They've come! I thought I should never
see them again!" Winnie's smooth fingers clutched Mrs. Farley's stiff
nerveless palm. "What shall I do? It hasn't been my fault, has it, Mamma
Farley?" Winnie's soft relentless gaze clung to her mother-in-law's
face.

Mrs. Farley nervously desired to evade. Winnie made her feel guilty of
the situation with which she had nothing to do.

"Now, dear! Now, dear! We won't talk about who's to blame. Could your
mother have written the note she did if she intended to reproach you?"

"But Papa----And Laurence hasn't come back yet! He and Papa will quarrel
again! You shouldn't have let him do this way, Mamma Farley! Oh, feel my
hands! They're so cold!" Her eyes, large and dark, shone with a languid
and deliberate excitement. She wished that Alice were in the room to see
her. Wry thoughts of Laurence. Resentment in Winnie's mind was like grit
in something that otherwise would have moved oiled.

"What must I do, Mamma Farley? Shall I go to the door?" Winnie wrung her
hands.

"I think you ought to meet her first. She would like to speak to you
before the rest of us come in."

"Oh, I can't! How can Laurence leave me like this?"

Mrs. Farley, called on again to explain Laurence, made some meaningless
gestures--clasped and unclasped her hands. Her fingers, pressed hard as
they intertwined, made her knuckles glow white.

"Now, dear! Now, dear!"

"You _must_ go with me! I can't bear it if Papa says anything to me
about Laurence! What shall I do?" Winnie dragged Mrs. Farley across the
brightly swept parlor carpet and into the hall.

May had already opened the front door. Mr. and Mrs. Price stood against
the light of the street, their faces in shadow. Behind them the coachman
was turning the carriage away. The footman sat very straight with his
arms folded. The wheel spokes flashed. The polished black sides
glistened.

Mrs. Price's flat face was very white above her elegant black dress.
There were fine lines of strain under her pale eyes staring wide through
her delicate pince-nez. The nostrils of her flat nose quivered a little.
She had a thin narrow body and broad flat hips. She was breathing
quickly. On her drawn lips there was a labored smile.

Mr. Price removed his beaver hat and revealed the top of his broad flat
head, bald and bright, above his hard eyes which were like cloudy stones
of pale blue. His thick under lip, thrust sullenly forward, showed
under his thin yellow-gray mustache. There was no color anywhere about
his face. Only under his chin where he had not shaved clean you might
detect his beard by a colorless shining.

There was a moment of silence and hesitation. "Winnie!" Mrs. Price's
voice shook. "Mamma!" They lay in each other's arms.

Mrs. Price's fragile hand moved uneasily over her daughter's hair.

Mr. Price, gruff and uncomfortable, his face unmoved, said, "Where do I
come in?"

Winnie reached out and patted her father's arm. He took her hand. She
kissed him, not wanting to. He made her think of herself. She wanted to
relax in joyous agony. Lifting her soft strange eyes to her mother,
Winnie was double, knowing, as before a mirror, how she looked. Sweet to
have people unkind when you could forgive them!

But behind everything the recollection of Laurie intruded harshly.

In the background Mrs. Farley stood uneasily, and May, afraid to enjoy
the family happiness, yet unable to leave, hopped from one foot to the
other with subdued exclamations, her face alternately blank with
confusion or atremble with response.

"Don't cry, Winnie, dear. We are all so glad, Mrs. Farley." Mrs. Price
pushed Winnie gently aside and put out a frail hand, determined, though
it shook a little. Mrs. Farley's fingers were clumsy, fumbling for Mrs.
Price. Mr. Price shook hands in a fat abrupt fashion. They passed into
the house.

"Not too much emotion. Not too much emotion," Mr. Price grumbled. May
retreated before him wonderingly. No one had noticed her.

Then Winnie said, "This is May, Mother."

They all stopped. May stopped inside herself. "Dear!" Mrs. Price had
kissed her. May knew the kiss to be stale, dry, with a bitter
middle-aged smell, and was ashamed of knowing. The dry bitter kiss drank
of May's coolness. She was dumb under the caress of the sick hand.

The parlor was clean and gloomy.

"Sit down, sit down," Mrs. Farley said. "I--we----" She was trembling
all over. She wept because of the rightness of things. "Such a glare!"
She tottered to the shade. Her silk dress rustled.

"There, Mrs. Farley. We're all right. An experience like this is good
for all of us. Christ has taught us to forgive our enemies and when we
do I believe we never have cause to regret it."

Mr. Price sat down awkwardly and coughed severely into his mustache. His
furtive gaze traveled malignantly about the shabby room.

"How-d'ye-do, Mrs. Price? Mr. Price?" Alice walked heavily in among
them. Mrs. Price turned around, disconcerted. Their hands touched. Alice
seemed to take charge of things. Mrs. Price suddenly felt weak and was
obliged to seat herself.

Winnie was annoyed. She went up to Alice plaintively. "Oh, I'm so happy,
Alice!" She wept.

Alice was still, like a warm rock. "We're happy to see you happy."

As Alice remained gruff and unmoved Winnie became more humble. "You
don't look like it. Please let me be happy, Alice. I can't if--if----"

"Nonsense," Alice said.

Winnie smiled mistily at everybody.

"Come sit by me. I want to see my dear little girl." Mrs. Price disliked
Alice, who remained hard and kind while Winnie cried with happiness.
"You're not well, I know. Mrs. Farley wrote me. There, there. We must
begin to take better care of you." Mrs. Price pulled Winnie to her.
Winnie's eyes, rapacious with humility, were lifted again.

Mr. Farley came in, casting a rapid glance around the group. His smile
was patient. Fear made him tired.

"Well, well--we're so--Mrs. Price." He stopped before her, not sure that
she would shake hands with him. She gave him her finger tips and he took
them miserably.

"Yes, I'm sure you all enjoy seeing Winnie happy," Mrs. Price said. She
was cold and kind. Mr. Farley knew what she was thinking of--Helen out
in Kansas City. They had spoken of the old scandal in objecting to
Winnie's marriage.

"Mr. Price?"

"Hello, Farley. Hello." Mr. Price got up reluctantly. His hand clasp was
a condescension.

Mr. Farley had given his hand limply. His mouth bent with acceptance.
His smile was still tolerant but a little bitter, and he did not look
up.

"Winnie comes first, Farley. Time to disagree about other things later."

"I hope we are through with disagreements."

"Yes, Farley, I hope we are. Ahem."

Mr. Price sat down again abruptly.

"I'm so happy, Papa Farley!"

Winnie's eyes. He shuddered, trying not to see them, fearful that he
would forget to smile. "I'm glad you are, dear."

Winnie clapped her hands and turned once more to her mother. "Bobby! You
haven't seen Bobby! Oh, he's the dearest----He's upstairs taking a nap."

Alice stood defiantly in the center of the gloomy room, her feet apart,
her stout hips set out. "Want me to see if he's awake?"

"Suppose we all go out and leave Winnie alone with her parents for a few
minutes," Mrs. Farley suggested, her voice quavering slightly. She
puckered her lips and frowned, smiling about her at the group. When she
stood up her gray taffeta dress settled slowly, with a calm sound, in
folds about her. The hem lay out on the carpet. She had a scrap of
yellow lace at her neck and above it in her withered loose skin you
could see the flutter of a pulse.

"We certainly should," Alice said.

"Why, that's very nice. I don't----" Mrs. Price looked around,
uncertain, well-bred.

"Yes, yes. Come, May." Mrs. Farley took May's small cold hand, moist in
her dry one. Alice went first and Mr. Farley shuffled after the others,
head bent, smiling, not sure why they were going out.

Mrs. Price had risen with her husband and stood, sad and calm, watching
them leave. Life had wrung her, but she had grown sure in compromise.
There was dignity in her sureness.

"Well," said Mr. Price shortly, "I don't see that husband of yours
about!"

Winnie started tremulously. She smiled at him with a relaxed mouth.
"Papa, dear, I know----" She gulped, still smiling.

"Yes, I know. I know. I suppose he's run away from us."

"He'll probably be in later, won't he, dear?" Mrs. Price's transparent
smile was a thin shield guarding Winnie from her father.

Winnie tried to speak. Then she gave way and flung her white arms about
her mother's throat. "Oh, M-mother!"

"There, there. I know."

"Confound him!" said Mr. Price very savagely, biting his mustache.

"Please, Perry!"

"Oh, that's all right. That's all right. I'm not going to lose my
temper."

"Don't cry, Winnie. Sweet Winnie."

"What I want to know is whether that--whether he refused to meet us or
not?" Mr. Price asked.

"Oh, Mother--Papa--I----"

"Don't cry, Winnie. It's all right. Your father has resolved to overlook
things and if he can bring himself to do that about what has already
happened this last little rudeness certainly won't matter."

"But he said he--he would come."

"He did, eh? And then went out."

"Now, Perry--please?" Replying to his wife's pale smile, Mr. Price
coughed ambiguously.

"You need never be afraid of your father conducting himself in anything
but a generous manner, Winnie. I wish you might have been at church last
Sunday when he presented the new organ!"

"I know, but----"

"That's all very well, dear." Mrs. Price's voice had a disappearing
quality. It floated and drifted from her lips and her words died away
from her like the shed petals of a flower.

"I want--I want you and Papa to let me be happy! I--I----Sometimes I
think nobody's happy. Mamma and Papa Farley are not. I----"

Above Winnie's bowed head Mr. and Mrs. Price exchanged glances.

"They don't deserve to be!" Mr. Price snorted after a minute.

Winnie glanced up. Mrs. Price's face twitched with worry.

"Now, Perry, dear, please? Remember! We decided not to speak of that
again." She nodded toward the closed door of the hall. "I suppose by now
you have heard all about Mamma and Papa Farley, Winnie--all the things
that worried your father so, that he tried to tell you about when you
and Laurence ran away--but living here with them as you are, I think it
best for us to try to forget it. Mrs. Farley is a very long-suffering
woman and has borne her lot very patiently."

Winnie wanted to ask more. She hid her face again. Once Laurie----

"Laurence never talks of it, and you know before, when Papa tried to
tell me, how it was--you wouldn't let him. What was it, Mamma?"

"Do we need to talk about it, dear?" Mrs. Price stroked Winnie's hair.

"It was the talk about the town. I don't see why she shouldn't hear it!
I wanted her to know it all before so that she could understand my
objection to such a match."

"But we never understood clearly how it was ourselves, Perry. You know
when Winnie was married and you wanted to tell her I thought it was no
fit topic for a young girl. I said----"

"Yes, I know you _said_, but if she had known all about the thing from
the start she might have made a better match for herself. At any rate,
she's old enough to hear things now."

Winnie looked up and stood away from her mother. "Please, Papa,
Laurie----"

"Yes, Perry, it isn't right to Winnie. We mustn't feel this way about
her husband."

Winnie's little face was hard and a small soft fire of malice burned in
her eyes. Though she resented Laurence, she was with him against her
parents. She would have exulted in making them feel his inexorableness.
Because he was strong against them she seemed to feel herself inside his
strength, corroding it with her weakness. Mingled with her desire to
swallow her world was a vague terror of her loneliness when it should
happen.

"Well, that's all right, Vivien. I'll say nothing about her husband, but
that father-in-law of hers----It seems to me the more she knows about
him the better!"

"Perry, but in their house!" Mrs. Price was weary. Her smile seemed to
hurt her. Her white hands shook.

Winnie was drawn up taut, cautious like a savage on a spoor.

"Perhaps Father ought to tell me all of it," she said.

"But not now! Not here! You said you knew----"

"I did know there was some reason Mamma and Papa Farley didn't get
along. I knew there was a woman----"

"Yes! That miserable woman he was entangled with in that filthy affair.
I don't remember whether I told you that he tried to leave Mrs. Farley
and live with her. Helen--Wilson--something--Mrs. Wilson. The husband
had him up as co-respondent. Then they discovered she was going to have
a child." Mr. Price spoke gruffly and hurriedly in a low voice and
chewed his mustache.

Winnie trembled with excitement. Mamma and Papa Farley. Laurie. She felt
crafty and sure of herself. Why had Laurie never told her all of this?
He did not like to have her speak of it.

"Perry, we can not! We must not! For Winnie's sake!"

"Did Papa Farley and the woman have the child, Papa?"

"Oh, Winnie," Mrs. Price protested, "how can you ask such things!"

Mr. Price, hands in pockets, rose on his toes and sucked his mustache in
and out.

"They committed every sin which the flesh has been heir to since the
fall of man, so I suppose they had a child too."

"You don't know?"

"I have it on very good authority that they did."

"The child, of course, was spirited away."

"And where did the woman go?"

"Out West. To Kansas or Texas. Something." Still he rose on his toes.
The flavor of his mustache seemed to give him a peculiar relish.

"Oh, Papa, how awful! I didn't know it was as bad as that." Winnie
dilated with her secret. A quick passionate resolution of triumph shot
through her. Her eyes shone tragically.

"Winnie--my dear--you are in no state to hear things like this," Mrs.
Price said. There was a light knock at the door. "Psh!"

Mr. Price started a little, but continued to elevate and lower himself
on his toes and stare at the ceiling. Winnie clutched her hands to her
breast.

"Come in." Mrs. Price lifted her trembling voice.

Alice's face in the doorway. None of them could look at her. Winnie met
the face at last.

"Bobby's awake."

"Isn't that nice. Now I will see the dear baby."

"Yes, Mother. Come, Father." Winnie, with a high dreamy expression of
conscious pain, followed Alice out.

The bedroom, dark, cluttered by too great an attempt at coziness, had
grown a little shabby. The yellow shades were drawn under the lace
curtains. The blue carpet showed here and there a warp of colorless
cords. On the sofa the velvet and plush pillows were embroidered with
mottos and flowers. There were a heavy bureau, an old-fashioned bed, and
Bobby's crib. May slept in the nursery across the hall.

Bobby, his eyes still opaque with sleep, sat upright in bed, a dreamy
look of disapprobation on his face.

Mrs. Price could say nothing for a moment, then, "How lovely! How
lovely! What a beautiful healthy child!"

Winnie caught him in her arms.

Mrs. Farley moved forward, feebly shocked. "He's too heavy! Oh, you
mustn't do that, Winnie!"

Winnie turned and gave him to her mother. Bobby's fat body was sodden
and relaxed in his grandmother's arms. Mrs. Price's resigned hands moved
over him agitatedly. "He's so beautiful!" Feeling ashamed, she knew not
why, she kissed him. "Look, Perry!"

"Fine boy," said Mr. Price.

Winnie danced about. "I knew you'd think so."

Mr. Farley waited sheepishly, approving with his patience.

"We're all proud of him," said Alice shortly. Mrs. Price glanced up with
a start. "He's a fine grandson," she declared after a minute. There was
something defiant in the way she stroked his hair, but she remained very
gentle and ladylike.

May stood to one side, quivering. She wanted them to see her but, for
fear they might send her away, kept very quiet. When Bobby did not want
to be petted she was uncomfortable and when he liked it she was happy
too.

Laurence had come into the house and, finding the lower floor deserted,
had gone upstairs. He stood in the bedroom doorway. Winnie saw him
first. She was disconcerted for a moment. A little shiver of excitement
went through her. But she recovered herself as she gazed at him and felt
small and strong.

"Laurie!" She made a cooing sound of pleasure. She turned to her mother.
"Oh, Mamma, I want you and Laurie to hug!"

Mrs. Price's face was stained with faint color. She grew brittle and
tense in her uncertainty. Holding Bobby on her arm, she put her hand
out. It was as if she put her hand between herself and Laurence. "I hope
we both love Winnie enough to overlook things," she said.

"I hope so, Mrs. Price," he agreed, coming forward, his lids drooping as
if to shut out the painful sight of them all. He smiled in shame. They
shook hands.

"Now, Papa!" Winnie led her father forward by his coat sleeve.

"How-d'ye-do, Farley? How-d'ye-do?" Mr. Price was bluff and reluctant.
Their hands barely touched. Laurence kept his glance on the carpet.

"Now I am so happy!" Winnie clung to her husband's arm. Her softness
sank into him. He felt that if he lived he must harden himself against
it. When she finally freed him he drew a deep unconscious breath. Then
he forced his somber eyes full on Mrs. Price's face. "I am thankful, for
Winnie's sake, that you and Mr. Price made up your minds to this," he
said.

"We won't reproach ourselves with the past, Mr. Farley," Mr. Price
interrupted. He would not allow his wife to be addressed in lieu of
himself.

"I've never reproached myself, Mr. Price," Laurence answered coldly.
Still he looked away.

"I don't doubt it, Mr. Laurence Farley! I don't doubt it!" Mr. Price's
manner was full of secret scorn. He rocked on his toes and sucked his
mustache ends again.

"The babies are dears," Mrs. Price said. "Bobby is wonderful."

Laurence regarded Bobby. "Sit up. Hold your head up. Don't act as though
you were half asleep."

"Don't be cross with him, Laurie!" Winnie pouted. Laurence was torn. He
must refuse to praise Bobby as the Prices praised him. Laurence felt
that he could not protect his child against the approbation of his
enemies. May sidled up to her father. When she touched him he did not
look down at her, but put his arm about her. He held his shame of her
close in his heart like a wound that he would not let be seen. He
stroked her hair.

"Bobby is too heavy for you, Mrs. Price," Mrs. Farley protested, coming
forward with an air of furtive protest.

"No, no!" Mrs. Price, exaggeratedly polite, held him closer and smiled.
The smile made Mrs. Farley helpless. Mrs. Price knew it.

Mr. Farley had been outside the group. Now he moved nearer Mrs. Price
and, leaning forward, shook Bobby's inert fist. "You like your old
grandad, eh? You like your old grandad?"

Bobby scowled on them all and put his thumb to his mouth.

"What did I tell you about sucking your thumb?" Laurence demanded
sternly.

Winnie's sweet eyes, covert with knowledge, gloated on her husband's
face. "Don't be cross to him, Laurie, when everything's so nice."

"Stop sucking your thumb." Laurence took Bobby's thumb down from his
mouth.

"For Heaven's sake, leave him alone. You'll nag him to death. All this
ohing and ahing is enough to drive him to something worse than sucking
his thumb," Alice said shortly.

Laurence gave her a swift contemptuous glance of anger, but controlled
himself. "That's a good boy," he said more kindly as Bobby lifted
himself straighter and stared around.

"Oh, everything's so nice! I was so afraid it wouldn't be!" Winnie
sighed again with happiness. Laurence passed his hand over his eyes, the
delicate hand that, below the coarse sleeve of his coat, was like the
revelation of a secret.

"You didn't think your husband was going to refuse to shake hands with
me, I hope?" Mr. Price demanded. His unsmiling joviality was terrifying.
No one could ever say exactly when he became serious and he was
perfectly aware of the tremors of uncertainty that stirred in his
hearers. He enjoyed disturbing them.

"We are exercising mutual forbearance," Laurence put in quietly. In the
irritation of Mr. Price's presence something was slipping from
Laurence's grasp. It was only half-heartedly that he continued to hold
himself.

"Forbearance toward me! I hope you don't think I want you to exercise
forbearance toward my religious views, young man! Has he come to his
senses since you married him, Winnie?"

Winnie smiled feebly. Laurence looked at the floor. His lip twitched.

Mr. Price seemed to wish to drown out the echo of his words in the ears
of those present and began to talk fiercely to Bobby. "Fine child.
Father not going to raise you up to be a prizefighter, is he? Wouldn't
surprise me. I hope your mother'll bring you up as a Godfearing man. She
mustn't leave your education regarding the next world to your father.
You'd better take him in hand, Winnie." He stared at his daughter with
his vague hard eyes.

Laurence felt his parenthood raped. "Winnie and I have come to a perfect
understanding regarding Bobby's education," he sneered.

Mr. Price glanced up at Laurence. "Have, eh? Ain't you an atheist? Last
time I talked with you, didn't you tell me you were an atheist?"

"I did, Mr. Price. I'm afraid I am deficient in tact." Smiling, Laurence
lifted eyes in which the light of hate was drawn inward toward some
obscure point of agony.

Mrs. Price set Bobby on the floor. His legs were stiff with being held
and he made a few steps away from her uncertainly like a drunkard. "The
dear child!" she murmured uneasily. Her quiet smile was over her face
like the still surface of a pool filled underneath with little
frightened fish.

"Tact, eh?" Mr. Price was not sure what the remark meant, but, to give
himself time, permitted a knowing twinkle to creep into his eyes. He
rose on his toes. "If you'll leave off trying to set up science in the
place of God we'll overlook your lack of tact," he conceded finally.

Laurence bit his lips. He assumed an irritating air of indulgent
amusement. It was irresistible. He dared not look at Winnie. "I've sworn
to preserve a reverential silence in regard to all of your pet
fallacies, Mr. Price."

"My pet fallacies, eh! The years haven't taught you respect for the
opinions of your betters, then?"

"I've never met them," Laurence said. Mr. Farley coughed. Mrs. Price had
called Bobby back and was talking to him in a low tone, very intently.
Mrs. Farley talked to Bobby too. Alice made with her tongue a clicking
sound of impatience. Laurence had moved away from May. She watched the
men in controversy. Her mouth hung stupidly open. She had a shivering
white face and her eyes were all pupil. She looked as though she had
drowned herself in the darkness of her own eyes.

"Please, you two!" Winnie laced and unlaced her fingers.

"You haven't? You know when you're in the wrong, do you?"

"On the rare occasions when that happens," Laurence said with an
ostentatious affectation of good humor.

"And you haven't found out yet that you're committing a sin when you set
yourself up in opposition to Divine Truth! You're very complaisant,
young man! Very complaisant! But I'll tell you that Natural Science is
out of date. The Darwinists and Haeckelists and the rest of the dirty
crew have to come crawling back to the Creator they denied, with their
tails between their legs."

"You're making a dangerous admission in acknowledging such an appendage,
Mr. Price." Smiling at the floor, Laurence reached out and drew May to
him again. He defied them with his loyalty to her.

"Am I? The devil had a tail before he ever heard of Darwin, seems to
me!" Mr. Price was still uneasy, but swelled a little with the readiness
of his retort.

"Laurie!" Winnie patted Laurence's sleeve, her voice humble.

The humility in her voice inferred something in him which outraged his
self-respect. "And I haven't a doubt that as in the present case the
ass had ears!" he said sharply.

Winnie began to cry.

"I'll go, Winnie," he told her. It was inevitable. He had been that way
before with Mr. Price. His hand fell from May's shoulder. He walked out.
In the silence the group could hear the thick beat of his feet as he
descended the carpeted stairs, and the reverberation of the front door
which he slammed as he passed into the street.

Mr. Price's face was a dull red. He puffed out his cheeks. "That's what
it comes to!" He shrugged his shoulders unutterably and turned with a
gesture of departure and dismissal.

"Please don't go, Father!"

Mrs. Farley was wringing her hands. As May watched she seemed to be
weeping from her own eyes her mother's tears.

"For Heaven's sake, don't take Laurence seriously, Mr. Price," said
Alice.

Mr. Price lifted both hands with the palms out. "I don't! I don't! God
forbid that any one should take that foolhardy blasphemy seriously."

Mr. Farley passed his hand over his face as though to brush away a
cloud. His eyes were uneasy, his smile one of apology. "Laurence will
regret it as soon as he is in the street."

"Regret! Regret's not the right emotion to recall that kind of talk. I
take no account of what he said to me, but no one can go about in
contempt of the God who made him and not suffer for it."

"I know----" Mr. Farley hesitated. His lips quivered a little.

"Oh, I knew I couldn't be happy!" sobbed Winnie.

Mrs. Price took her daughter in her arms. "Now, dear, your father has
made up his mind to be forbearing. He won't go back on his word."

"No, I won't go back on my word, but I don't know whether I can ever
bring myself to the point of coming into this house again. Not when that
man's here."

"You oughtn't to take Laurence seriously, Mr. Price," Alice repeated. "I
think we ought to forget about him and not spoil Winnie's day."

"I can't forget about him, Alice!" Winnie lifted her head indignantly
from her mother's shoulder. Deep in her imagination Winnie, in a lace
nightdress, was putting her arms about Laurie's neck. Her veins swelled
strong and taut with confidence. She resented the injustice of being
forced to choose between Laurence and her parents. Because of other
things she could not forgive she would pardon him the day's scene, but
she would not pardon her parents yet.

"It's all right, dear. Miss Farley don't mean that. She only wants us to
forget the things your husband said to your father and I think that is
exactly right. After he considers it I am sure he will come to the
conclusion that he acted wrongly and be sorry too."

"I've had so much trouble," Winnie went on.

"Come, Bobby, let us all go downstairs and play games and help Mamma to
forget her troubles." Alice jerked Bobby's hand. Leaning on her mother,
Winnie followed. Mrs. Farley, her eyes red-rimmed with unshed tears of
perplexity, shambled after, her dress rustling and disturbing her desire
for self-effacement. Mr. Farley descended the stairs with finger tips
gliding along the rail, smiling the abased smile of a blind man. May,
hesitating on each step, dragged unnoticed a long way behind.

In the early morning the cloudy air had a texture like wet wool. The sky
radiated colorless heat like a pool of warm water which one saw into
from the depths. Work had not yet begun on the corner house, but in
front of it dangled platforms suspended from pulleys. The vacant windows
smeared with paint gave the house the look of a silly face smeared with
weeping, an expression of tortured immobility.

Alice, on her way to work, had just emerged from her front doorway. As
she descended to the street she watched ahead of her a tall, very thin
woman in a worn silk blouse and an old skirt that still smacked of an
ultra mode. The woman dragged beside her a very little boy in tight
pants and a gay shirt. The little boy, swinging by her hand, leaned
heavily away from her to pull a small red wooden wagon after him.

When the woman turned her head Alice saw her bright blonde hair combed
in glossy and salient puffs, a cheap and unconscious defiance above her
wasted face and her breasts, sucked dry on her flat body.

Alice walked after her. Life. Thinking of money. In the hot bed they
touched each other. Rent due. The child began to cry.

Old maid barricaded behind ridicule. Coolness of being outside.
Loneliness like a cool wound.

The woman went on. Taller, narrower in distance, with her long limbs and
graceful stoop she resembled a sculptured angel. Tomb. Apartment. The
woman walked before Alice into a narrow marble doorway. The stone rolled
back and the angel went into the tomb. Haggard and bitter face. A little
rouge put on carelessly. Despair. No one knows why.

Laurence had come in during the night and gone to sleep on the box couch
without disturbing Winnie. In the morning she was the first to awaken.

It had rained before dawn. The hot sun floated outside the window in
voluptuous mists. The white curtains seemed stained with the
pinkish-brown light. They swayed and parted and between their folds the
moist air flowed heavily from the steaming street.

Winnie could hear the staccato tap of a hammer on the house next door.
Horses' hoofs rang on the asphalt with a flat sound.

The curtains opened like lips and made a whispering noise. Then Winnie
could see the wet bronze roof opposite shining blankly against the faint
bright sky.

The room was crowded with the atmosphere of two people who have
quarreled. They were oppressed by their consciousness of each other.
Through the darkness of his shut lids Laurence, only feigning sleep,
tried to ascend above the close room and his almost intolerable
awareness of Winnie's presence.

She had seen his lids flutter. Tired and sweet, she regarded him
mercilessly. She could see how tense the lines of his body were under
the couch cover he had drawn up over his feet. His lids, pressed tight
together, twitched a little.

"Laurie!"

With a helpless feeling, he opened his eyes.

Winnie's heart beat combatively, triumphantly. "I've been lying here
looking at you," she said, her plaintive pout begging him to infer
everything. "Bobby's still asleep."

Bobby lay in his little bed relaxed like a drowned child. His lips were
pale. His face damp with the heat. His shock of blonde hair fell back on
the pillow away from his head. Winnie, beside her big baby, abandoned
herself to a sense of dependence which she felt him to justify.

"Yes? I must have slept very hard." In an effort to hide his surprise
Laurence responded quickly to her overture. He sat up, smiling
elaborately, and began rubbing his eyes.

Winnie would not let him escape through such casualness. "Are you still
angry with me, Laurie?" She lifted herself among the pillows and rested
on one elbow. There was a terrible youngness about her soft, hungrily
uplifted face, her thin neck, the collar bones showing below her white
throat. Her eagerness was too vivid. He was conscious of her rapacious
youth. It made him tired. Youth demanding of him life and more life.
Winnie was ill, but there was no rest for them even in her pain. He felt
old and afraid of her, as though he would never be able to get up from
the couch.

"Angry with you? Was I angry with you?" He covered his eyes. His lips,
smiling below his fingers, were deprecating. He stood up slowly and
lifted his trousers from a chair. He felt ridiculous to himself putting
them on.

"Laurie? Please? Don't be angry with me for wanting to see Mamma!"

He was hurt without knowing how she hurt him.

"Please kiss me, Laurie, dear! Don't be angry! I can't bear to have you
angry with me!" Her eyes, strangely defenseless, opened softly to his.
Their softness enveloped him and drew him down against the harsh little
sparks of reserve that burnt in their depths.

"Kiss you?" he said. He took her fingers in his and kissed them. His
lips were grudging. He still smiled. "Don't accuse me of being angry
with you, Winnie. I want you to have your mother back."

"But I want you, too. Kiss me! _Really!_ Not like that."

He leaned forward and his lips brushed hers. But she would not let him
go. She was so slight, pulling him down, that he could not resist her.
She pressed her mouth hard against his face.

"Don't be angry with me."

"I'm not angry--wasn't angry." Each word was a little shake to loosen
himself from her.

"You won't talk to Papa that way again?"

"I won't give myself the opportunity. I won't see him again."

"Oh, Laurie!"

He withdrew above her, making himself paternal. "You must be sensible
about this thing, Winnie. It's all right. I want you to see and be with
your parents. If I avoid them it will be only for your sake. You're not
well, Winnie. You're a little unreasonable."

"I can't bear being sick! Oh, Laurie, I won't be operated on! I can't
bear it!" Her voice was passionate. She shrank, looking smaller among
the big pillows. He pushed her into the limbo of invalidism. She did not
know how to get out. His kindness was a wall between them.

He smoothed her hair. She was crushed under his tolerant hand smoothing
away curls from her tear-wet face. "Shall I tell Mamma Farley you are
ready for your breakfast?"

She gazed at him. Her eyes hurt him. They stabbed him through the
silence she made. "Laurie, I think we are going to be so happy and then
all at once when you talk about my being sick you seem so far away. You
do love me?" She clung to his arm.

"Of course."

"Then kiss me again." He kissed her. Her terrible hunger hurt and
confused him. He would rather not have seen her thin throat that
suggested a young swan's, her pointed chin, her eyes, and the reddish
hair which had slipped in confusion about her shoulders. The room,
filled with her knick-knacks, choked him--her clothes on a chair, some
soiled satin slippers, the mirror from which she seemed always to
shine, her child asleep--hers and his together. He could not explain
himself--felt that he was growing hard. He was ashamed of not loving her
enough. Ashamed of the strength it gave him to know that he was not for
her--now--that her health was keeping them apart.

"I want us to be happier than anybody, Laurie! Your father--you never
talk to me about it! That woman out West who had a child by him! It's
so--so terrible!" She felt his resentment of her persistent reference to
it. There was something drunken in her which made her sling out words
that were not wanted. She regretted a little this waste of her hoarded
knowledge, but at the same time she was glad. He did not want to talk of
it. She felt injured because he did not want to talk to her of it. She
leaned against him. The tears ran from her blind uplifted eyes.

"That's nonsense, Winnie. What have we to do with them? I want you to be
happy, too." He sat down beside her. She felt hopeless, as though she
had lost him.

"Not just me, Laurie. Both of us."

"Of course. Both of us."

She was crushed. "You didn't know I knew all about your father, Laurie."

"No. I never told you the details, because it didn't seem worth while."

"You never tell me anything--not about yourself--or anything."

"I didn't think I could tell you anything about myself you didn't know
already."

"Don't joke! I want you to love me."

"I do love you."

She was tired. She buried her face in the pillows. He rose from the bed
and put on the rest of his clothes, but when he said good-by to her she
would not answer him. He outraged the essence of her sex. She was weak.
She wanted him to be weaker than she. She felt that he owed it to her.
It was a crumb from his strength, she felt, to be weak to her who had to
be weak to the whole world. She would not forgive him.

Laurence went out of the room, out of the house. A pale fiery mist rose
up from between the houses and filled the wet morning street. The houses
with lowered blinds were secret and filled with women. Girls going to
work came out of the houses like the words of women. Women going to
market passed slowly before him with their baskets. Pregnant women
walked before him in confidence. The uncolored atmosphere threw back the
sky. It was the mirror of women. Laurence felt crowded between the
bodies of women and houses. He walked quickly with his head bent.

On the concrete pavements, washed white as bones by the storm of the
night before, were rust-colored puddles. Dark and still, they quivered
now and again, like quiet minds touched by the horror of a recollection.
The reflections of the houses lay deep in them, shattered, like dead
things.

Mrs. Farley stumbled up the dark stairway. Her knotted fingers with
their tight-stretched skin kept a tense and fearful grasp on the
scratched rim of the lacquered tray. On the clean frayed napkin she had
put one of her best plates and on it rested a bloody peach and a dull
bright knife. The peach, balanced uncertainly, rolled a little as Mrs.
Farley moved. The knife clinked. Black coffee beaded with gold turned to
saffron when it poured over into the saucer. The toast, burnt a little
along the edges, slid back and forth in the napkin which enfolded it.

She stopped before Winnie's room. "Winnie!" Her voice sounded cracked
with fatigue. With the tip of her black slipper, which was rough and
gray with wear, she pushed the door back. The room opened bright before
her. Her smile grew hard and solicitous.

Winnie sat up straight among the creased pillows against the dark old
headboard. Her eyes were red. She smiled, too, and was consciously
brave.

"Good morning, Mamma Farley! See how you have worked for poor little
no-account me! Put the tray down and let me kiss you."

"Bobby isn't awake?" Mrs. Farley asked, embarrassed by her own pleasure
as she pressed bitter and grateful lips to Winnie's firm cheek.

"Are you glad I was happy yesterday?"

"I hope you are happy today. You know how glad we all were."

"I want to be happy, Mamma Farley."

"And you will be, Winnie." Mrs. Farley set the tray shakily on the
tossed bed clothes.

"You, too, Mamma Farley, dear. I want you to be happy, too." Winnie held
out a small inexorable hand, and Mrs. Farley, unable to behave
otherwise, took it. Winnie squeezed her mother-in-law's fingers. "I know
you haven't always been happy, Mamma, dear." Winnie's dim eyes were
lustful with pity. Mrs. Farley was frightened. Her hand trembled and she
tried to pull back and resist the invitation of sympathy. "Papa Farley
ought to love you more than anybody in the world!" Winnie asserted,
passionately tender.

Mrs. Farley was shaken. Who's been talking to Winnie? She pressed her
lips quiveringly shut. Her eyeglasses twinkled and shuddered with her
heaving breast. Winnie felt herself strong with a love that nothing
could resist. Exultant, she gloated inwardly over the knotted hand that
trembled in her grasp.

"Your parents--I don't know--we won't talk about old people's troubles,
Winnie." Mrs. Farley was recovering herself. Perhaps Winnie didn't mean
that. "I suppose Papa Farley loves me in his way just as you love me in
yours."

Winnie would not let her go. "You stand up for him. You're so good to
him," she insisted with a kind of worshiping commiseration.

"Why shouldn't I be?" Mrs. Farley dared, trying to smile while she
frowned, her evasive eyes shifting a little.

"Because he don't deserve it! Because he did what he did. Oh, Mamma
Farley, I know you don't want me to talk about it, but I can't help it.
I love you so. You're so wonderful to me!" Winnie's eyes shone,
mercilessly sweet, into the hunted eyes of the elder woman.

"I don't know what you mean, Winnie."

They looked at each other. Mamma Farley could not look. She picked at
the sheet.

"You dear! You dear!" Winnie hugged her. She was crying.

Again they leaned apart and regarded one another. Mrs. Farley's
inflamed, withered eyelids twitched.

"Do you think Laurence really loves me? I'm so afraid!" Winnie said
suddenly.

"Of course, Winnie."

"Oh, Mamma Farley, I want to be happy. I couldn't bear it if
Laurence----" She buried her face in Mamma Farley's dress. Mrs. Farley
stroked her hair.

"We're all foolish when we're young, but God is good to us. When we grow
old we can have a little peace. But you're young enough--even for the
kind of thing you want." Her pale mouth had a shriveled look of
bitterness. "Love between men and women--the love you are thinking
about--is not much in life, Winnie."

"But I couldn't bear not to have--not to have anybody love me."

"Look in the mirror. They'll love you." Mrs. Farley's eyes in her wet,
wrinkled face were hard with contempt under the seared granuled lids.

Winnie, lying back, gloated over the thin white hair, the lined flaccid
cheeks, and the eyes that glowed with weeping. Winnie swam in the
strength of love like a swimmer sure of himself in trusted waters. She
was grateful to the age and ugliness which did not claim her.

Mrs. Farley did not want Winnie to gaze at her any more. "Look! Bobby's
awake," she said.

Winnie was satisfied and ready to be glad of Bobby, too.

The child sat up drunkenly. His touseled hair, matted with sweat, lay
dark on his brow. His eyelids were pale and swollen with sleep. He
rubbed them with his fists.

"Children are the surest happiness," Mrs. Farley said.

Winnie was oppressed. "I'm so afraid of being sick, Mamma Farley."

"You'll soon be well, I hope." Mrs. Farley had an air of resolution and
dismissal. She went squinting to the crib. "My, what a sleepy boy!"

Laurie. Love. Children. Winnie had a terrible sense that she was losing
some unknown thing which was precious and belonged to her but of which
she was afraid.

"His night drawers are too small. His grandmother'll have to make him
some. There's some nice stuff at that store next to the bakery."

They talked of shops. The atmosphere of the room seemed to lift with the
lightness and sureness of their talk. They were safe and at rest among
unchanging irrelevances. Women knew best the sureness of trifles. These
were the things which did not change--which men could not change.

Late afternoon. There was no sun. Below the blank gray sky, the long
blank street. Along the street a pair of sleek and ponderous black
horses, with thick manes and shaggy fetlocks, plodded before a loaded
dray. Their bodies rocked and swayed tensely with strain. Their huge
feet clattered and strove against the asphalt. The hands of the driver,
red, with full, knotted veins, hung loose between his knees, holding the
slack reins. His body, in a khaki shirt, was hunched forward miserably.
From his fat stupid face his eyes glanced dully under a bare thatch of
neutral tinted hair. Only the horses, purposeful and immense in their
obedience, seemed to understand.

In the gutter a street-sweeper, mild and tired, pushed dry ocher-colored
manure into heaps. Again and again he stooped and lifted the shovel and
the manure fell into a cart. He wore ragged white gloves too large for
him. He was patient, but his gaze roamed, vague with speculation.
Servant of the horses that dirtied the street, he was less sure than
they.

At the corner house work was over for the day. The abandoned platforms
of the painters dangled loosely on the long ropes. Through the smeared
window-panes you saw empty rooms blank as the faces of idiot women
waiting for love.

Alice walked slowly home from work. She saw her own windows where the
awnings did not stir. Drooping, they cast their scalloped outlines
vaguely into the depths of the shadow-silvered glass. May was on the
front step.

"Hello, May." Aunt Alice's voice, very gruff.

May sucked her finger and ducked her head sidewise, smiling. Her finger
slipped out of her mouth with a plop. She put it back between her wet
lips.

"Coming in?" Aunt Alice held the door back. May went after her into the
hall that was full of the smell of baking bread. Aunt Alice threw off
her hat and walked, heavy-footed, into the living-room. May trailed
after her in limp timidity.

Winnie, in her lilac négligé, sat in an armchair. "Oh, Alice. I've been
talking to the doctor again and he's so horrid. He says I should have
been operated on right after Bobby was born and now I'm getting worse."

Alice stood beside the chair and stared down. "Doctors like to croak."

Winnie reached up and clutched Alice's square dark hand. Winnie's white
fingers were little claws digging into Alice's swarthy flesh. "Say I
don't have to! I can't, Alice! I can't!"

"Well, I certainly wouldn't until I got into better shape nervously than
you are now."

"Mother wants me to go away with her and I don't dare. I know it would
do me good but I don't dare, Alice." Winnie half sobbed.

"Don't dare? What rot! Why shouldn't you dare?"

"Laurie will hate me if I go off with Mother! It doesn't matter how sick
I am, he will hate me!"

"Winnie, you're talking the most unmitigated nonsense."

"I'm not, Alice. You don't know. He can't forgive me for wanting to be
kind to Mother."

"I haven't noticed any signs of unforgiveness on his part. I admit he
acted like a fool on Sunday but I suppose he can't be blamed. Your
father's not the easiest person in the world to get on with, himself."

"I know, but you don't understand. Sometimes I think Laurie hates me for
being sick. He don't love me any more! I know he don't."

"Laurence hate you for being sick! Good God!" Then Alice added, "You
shouldn't talk this way before May, Winnie."

Winnie had her eyes shut. She made a gesture away with her hands. "Go
out, May."

May moved into a shadow by the door, but she did not go out.

"I can't bear being sick. It m-m-makes me so old. Papa Farley--that time
Papa Farley--that woman. They had a child, M-m-mother told me. Oh, do
you suppose Laurence will do like that?"

"Like what?" Alice's voice was sharp--almost threatening--with distrust.

Winnie kept her eyes shut and wrung her hands. "I thought you knew all
about it, Alice."

"About what?"

"Don't act as though you couldn't forgive me! That woman out
West--and--and your father started to get a divorce and gave it up. I'm
so afraid Laurence won't love me any more!"

Alice knew that her parents had had some trouble. It was the year she
was away at school. She had heard fragments--allusions. Now she felt
strange. She wanted to hear more but could not--not from Winnie's lips.
Alice's coarsely fine face burnt bronze with shame. Her sad eyes of
thick brown searched Winnie's evasive features distrustfully. "You
mustn't talk about this, Winnie," Alice said. "In the first place it has
nothing to do with Laurence. You know as well as I do that Laurence
cares for nobody but you and never will. I don't believe he feels hard
toward you because you want to see your mother."

"Now you're angry with me?"

"I'm not. I'm going upstairs to wash and brush. You cut out this morbid
nonsense, Winnie." Alice smiled a hard, kind, dismissing smile, and
turned away, walking briskly out with her firm, awkward stride.

May edged out of the shadow and came nearer her mother. It was half dark
in the room. Winnie sniffed, oblivious to May. May came and stood very
near. She reached over and passed a hesitant hand along the arm of her
mother's chair.

Winnie started. May drew back and stood teetering on one foot, her face
alternately dark and smiling. "Oh, May, I t-told you to go out."

May hung her head. A sort of shiver like the shimmer of water passed
over her pale, uneasy face. She wanted to go toward her mother. Wanted
almost unendurably to go. But something in her mother held her off. May
was in torment between the two impulses which possessed her equally.

Winnie wiped her eyes. "Come here," she said at last. May went forward,
smiling, trembling, half released. "You love me, May?"

May could not speak. She choked with affirmation. Her face was in
Winnie's warm neck. May lost herself in the warm throat and the soft
hair. If she did not have to see her mother's eyes it was well. May had
a terror of eyes. They made her know things about herself which she
could not bear. Sharp looks splintered her consciousness.

Winnie, overcoming a shudder, admitted the caress. "You'll always love
Mother, won't you?"

After the evening meal Mr. Farley took a newspaper into the living-room.
There he sat by the lamp with the green shade. Through the still room
the light, concentrated under the lamp shade, rushed to the carpet. On
the way it spread, glistening, over the oak table, and brightened
one-half of Mr. Farley's face. The newspaper in his hands was glassy
with light. The print looked gray.

The rain that made the air sharp had not yet fallen and the dim curtains
against the open windows shook now and then as with sudden palpitant
breaths.

Alice walked about the room nervously. Several times she went to the
window and glanced out. When she pulled the curtain back her father's
newspaper flapped against his hand, but he showed no impatience.

Alice came and stood before his chair. "Come go for a walk with me!"

"Walk?" He looked up at her. He was vaguely patient and smiling a
little. "Isn't it raining?"

"No. Come along." Alice took his arm. He folded his paper carefully and
placed it on the table. Then, stiff and heavy in his movements, he got
up.

Alice dragged him into the hall and he took his hat down. "You ought to
have something over your head," he said to her.

"Rubbish! It's summer. Come on."

Alice flung the front door wide. The wind took their breaths for a
second. He stumbled a little as he followed her down the steps and into
the empty street. Overhead the moon, a lurid yellow, scudded between
transparent black clouds.

"It's too stormy to walk. We mustn't go far or the rain will catch us."

"It won't yet awhile. I had to get out of that house." Alice linked her
arm in his. She could feel his discomfort in her talk as though it came
through her sleeve against him.

"I'm sorry to hear you talk about your home like that, Alice." Mr.
Farley sounded hurt.

"Who wouldn't! I loathe Mamma--that's all."

Mr. Farley's arm quivered where it brushed Alice's shoulder. "You're
unjust to her. She's done the best she can for you."

"Has she! Well, my God, she couldn't have done worse."

"I don't think you're just to her."

They walked on. Alice's heavy skirt beat her ankles above her stout
shoes. Mr. Farley's coat-tails flapped. Paper rustled in the gutter.

"You make me sick about being just to Mamma," Alice said almost
tenderly. "Whom was she ever just to? What about being just to
yourself?"

"We can't ask too much for ourselves in this life," Mr. Farley said
soberly.

"Bosh! I wish to Heaven you had left her that time when you wanted to!"

Mr. Farley was shocked. Alice had never spoken to him like this. His arm
quivered more than ever. Unable to reply to her for the moment, he was a
dung-beetle, rolling his astonishment over and over and making it ready
for speech.

"I hardly know how to answer you, Alice. I don't think there ever was a
time when I could have taken any joy which came through a sacrifice of
other people's happiness. I----" He was confused by his own words. He
stopped talking suddenly: Alice could feel that his body was rigid
against hers. He could not forgive her.

"Not even when you loved that Mrs. Wilson, eh?" She remembered the name
all at once, having heard it long ago.

Mr. Farley stopped, still. He put his hand to his forehead. His other
arm fell away from Alice. It took him an instant to answer her. She
tapped her foot on the pavement. The wind whizzed in their ears.

"Alice, I--you are referring to things too personal to--I ought to
resent it."

"Resent it. I'd be glad to see you resent something." She wanted him to
strike fire against her mother's dullness.

He could not bear her smile.

"Your mother is a good woman----"

"I suppose she is. God save us from good women!"

Mr. Farley walked on slowly. He walked like an old man. It made him feel
tired when he thought that anyone questioned the nobility and excellence
of his resolution.

"When you have had more experience of life, Alice, you will see how
easily we err, and how it's always better to accept the weight of old
burdens rather than assume new ones."

"I'm not likely to be offered new ones."

"What do you mean?"

"What I say. Ugly old maid at twenty-nine. My life will go on like this
forever and ever."

Mr. Farley was ashamed with Alice because she told the truth about
herself. It hurt him to face her ugliness and not be allowed to lie to
her.

"That's morbid talk," he said, walking more slowly and rubbing his
forehead again.

"Bosh! I'm not morbid. My life ends where it began--that's all. You're
the one who makes me sick. Why don't you kick out of this? Why don't you
find somebody with some self-respect who means something to you, and go
off and be happy? Some people may admire you for all this giving up your
soul and allowing it to be spit on, but I don't." Her heart was hard
against him. It relieved her to push her father from her out into life.
It helped her to make him live in her stead.

Large round raindrops pressed their foreheads softly like rounded lips.
The rain falling through the chill air was warm.

"I hardly think it has been any sacrifice of my self-respect for me to
do my duty toward your mother," he answered resentfully.

They walked on quickly, a little apart. Alice was silent with
irritation. She tried to fill her soul with the calm of disgust but she
was feverish against his inertia. Mr. Farley felt himself misunderstood.

Alice had been reading in bed. It was late at night. The room was very
still. She heard Mrs. Farley's tired step on the back stair coming up
from the kitchen.

"Mamma!" Alice called in a sharp, subdued voice.

Mrs. Farley ambled slowly forward and leaned against the portal. She
squinted at Alice wearily. "Well?"

"Come in."

"I want to go to bed early. I've had so many things to do." She entered
the room uncertainly and sat on the edge of a chair. Her tired hands
twitched a little in her slack lap. Her hair was untidy. Sweat glistened
on her gray upper lip above her pale brown mouth. When she turned her
head Alice saw the thick white down on her cheek. Her glasses were on
her nose and behind them her blank eyes regarded her daughter
stealthily. "You don't seem to be well, Alice. I've noticed how fidgety
you've been getting in this heat."

"I wish it were only the heat." Alice sat up and hugged her knees with
her big bare arms. Her nightgown was loose. It showed her heavy neck and
the swell of her large breast. Her hair had slipped down and hung in
moist dull locks about her hard intent face. "Do you think this
operation Winnie has to go through with is serious?"

Mrs. Farley rocked herself a little. Her heel tapped the carpet
restlessly. "I don't know. How can you tell?"

"At any rate her parents can afford to give her the best care."

"Yes, but that's the worst of it! The worst of it. Laurence can't bear
to have her take things from them." Mrs. Farley spoke in a worn flat
voice and rocked herself again.

"How absurd!"

"Oh, he'll have to let them help. There's nothing else to do."

"I suppose that's why Winnie's always in hysterics lately?"

"Is she?"

"My God, Mamma! Take a little interest in something."

Tears of protest rose in Mrs. Farley's eyes. Her mouth shook. She made
an effort to rise, then sank back. "No, I take no interest in anything
but work," she said bitterly. "Keeping house for you and your
father----"

"Why do you do it, then? My God, you could have stopped ten years ago."
Seeing her mother's eyes fill with tears, Alice's own dry eyes felt a
sudden coolness. "Whom do you do it for? Laurence and I are old enough
to look out for ourselves!"

Mrs. Farley's shoulders drooped and shivered. She wagged her head on her
lean neck in helpless protest and reproach. Her body rocked. "I suppose
your father don't need me," she said scornfully, crudely wiping the
sweat from her face with her hand. She looked like a blind woman,
hearing Alice from a long way off.

"Of course he doesn't need you! You ought to have found that out the
time he tried to get a divorce from you!" Alice, mysteriously urged to
cruelty, bore down upon her mother. Alice's eyes glittered inscrutably.

Mrs. Farley could not bear them. She stood at last, tottering a little.
Her breath came quickly and raspingly. "Hush, I tell you! Hush! You've
brought this up before. There's something cruel in you makes you want to
go over and over things that are done with!"

"I suppose you think I'm an interfering old maid?"

"I don't know what you are."

"And you don't want to know." Alice sounded amused. It was an unpleasant
sound.

Mrs. Farley, gazing very deliberately at the carpet, blew her nose.
"I've never discussed my relation to your father with his children and
I'm not going to now. I've sacrificed myself for what I thought best
and it's nobody's business but my own."

"Sacrificed!" echoed Alice contemptuously.

"I won't listen to you and that's all there is to it. I never expected
gratitude so I'm not disappointed." Mrs. Farley, not looking back,
dragged into the hall.

Alice lay still an instant, her expression one of relentless retrospect.
Her eyes were enigmatic but her mouth was twisted with disgust and her
nostrils were wide and tense. She reached above her head and turned out
the light.

The curtain flapped. Staccato fingers of rain tapped on the pane.

In the room it was dark. The narrow dark. The walls of the room drew
near. She felt herself pressed between them.

Alice tossed from side to side. When she lay quiet finally the darkness
receded from her, touched her lids softly in passing.

Death! Oh, my God, I want life!

She sat up in bed holding her heavy breasts. Father! A great body
unmotivated. Alice's hot will sought for a world to impregnate.
Wish-washy mother who had given birth meaninglessly.

Horace Ridge. She grew cool with despair--desireless.

The hot sheets turned cool. Far away the beat of rain on the window.
Under the lifted sash the rain-wet wind swept through the room, frozen
pain, threads of frozen wonder embroidering the hot dark. Wet wind beat
the soggy awnings against the glass. A dank smell came in.

It was a cold August morning. The pale sky was filled with a dim still
light. In the dining-room the yellow shades, half lowered, strained the
gloomy radiance through them and made it a heavy orange. The tablecloth,
splattered with coffee stains like old blood, was overcast with
trembling reflections of yellow. The morning meal was over. The empty
plates were scattered about smeared with hardened egg. The half of a
muffin was mashed on the dingy carpet.

Mr. Farley, a little away from the table, sat reading his paper. Mrs.
Farley was collecting the débris of breakfast. Her feeble hands moved
among the dishes with shaken determination.

"Was your egg fried enough?" she asked.

"Yes, yes. Very nice." Mr. Farley glanced up and gave his wife a
sightless smile. Troubled by what Alice had said to him, he was
uncomfortable when Mrs. Farley spoke. He began to fold his paper.

What he was finished with, he pushed out of his mind into darkness.
Alice had dragged his memories, and now the past came up to him like a
corpse floating. Helen out West. She might come East next month. He
hoped not. His son. Place where he sent money. He paid to be allowed to
stop thinking about it.

"I'm worried about Winnie. I thought her reconciliation with her parents
would improve her frame of mind, but now she seems more nervous and
unhappy than ever. The thought of that operation preys on her mind."

"Well--I think she ought to go out into the country for a rest before
there's any more talk of operation."

"She thinks Laurence will never be able to forgive her if she goes off
with her mother and father."

"Oh, now I think that's too bad. She mustn't think things like that
about Laurence." Mr. Farley talked kindly with a sort of clerical
remoteness. His lips smiled wearily. His head was bent. He stood up.

Mrs. Farley picked up her pile of dishes; put the dishes between herself
and life. The talk with Alice the night before had made Mrs. Farley feel
furtive.

"Don't work too hard." Mr. Farley walked out.

Mrs. Farley saw May outside in the hall. "Come here, May. See if you can
help me take the plates to the kitchen."

May came in, glad to be called. Her grandmother did not look at her. She
picked up a plate with a cup on it. She walked into the kitchen, taking
careful steps, the rim of the plate, held with both hands, pressed so
tightly against her breast that it cut. The cup jiggled rhythmically,
bumping time to May's steps. May's mouth hung open. Her face was
bewildered with anxiety. Her breath came fast. With immense relief she
reached the sink and, leaning over, slipped the plate into it.

Mrs. Farley had to talk to some one. She wanted to push the trifles
forward in her life and crowd back the darkness, filling it with bright
hard things, baubles, grocerymen, and dishes; so she asked May, "Has our
groceryman gone by here this morning? He promised to call and exchange
that condensed milk for evaporated milk."

"No'm," May said.

Mrs. Farley, frowning, her brows twitching, looked at May. Mrs. Farley
could not see the little girl without feeling an irritable prompting to
command her. "Go wash your face and see if your mother is awake. If she
isn't, don't rouse her. Don't let Bobby see you or he'll begin to clamor
to get out of bed."

May ran dutifully out.

"Don't clatter up the steps!" Mrs. Farley called sharply.

May walked very softly up the creaking stairs.

Mrs. Farley had the soiled clothes to count. She left the dishes to soak
and went into the dining-room again with the big bundle tied in a sheet.

"One, two, three, four." She untied the sheet and began to count. She
could not count fast enough. She crammed her mind with numbers. It was
like trying to fill a slack sack to cover something hidden at the
bottom.

"Shirts. Socks."

Not darned. Must darn today. Alice's stockings. Alice is a hard, selfish
girl.

"Tablecloths. Two--two"--murmuring--"what did I say?"

Sacrifice. We must all make sacrifices. The home.

"One, two."

Her heart smoldered damply in its resignation. She squeezed love out of
her heart.

Those awful days! Ten years older. People one did not know seemed to
seek one accusingly in the street.

Furtively, she recalled the birth of her son, remembrance of a strength
that had somehow become weariness. Winnie.

In the dark doorway Winnie appeared in a muslin dress. She was smiling,
a little wan. Her hair was dressed high. She looked plaintive yet
determined.

"I won't be sick and lie around," she said. "I'm going to help you
work."

"You're going to do nothing of the sort! You sit right down here and
I'll give you your breakfast at once. Did that child wake you up after
all?"

"No. I was awake."

"Well, sit down."

"Oh, Mamma Farley, I want to fix my own egg." Winnie, protesting without
conviction, allowed herself to be pressed into a chair.

"Where did you leave Bobby?"

"He's still asleep."

"Well, you had no business to get up."

Winnie gazed up with sweet greedy eyes. "I don't dare be sick any more.
Sick people are horrid. Nobody loves them." Winnie's mouth was patient,
quivering, below her lifted eyes.

"Yes. Nobody loves them." Mrs. Farley joked laboriously.

"You dear!" Winnie reached out and grasped Mrs. Farley's hand. Winnie's
eyes, like brown bees, crept with their glance into the vague combative
eyes before them. Thinking of yesterday's talk, Winnie's gaze pierced
the rough-dried pongee blouse and the sagging black skirt, and saw the
small high-shouldered form beneath. Winnie's looks invited to pain as to
a bath of wine enjoyed with closed eyes.

Mrs. Farley's eyes filled with tears. Ugly and old, before Winnie's pity
Mrs. Farley was a woman beaten back by a lover. She put forth a smile
that was like a weak and gentle hand caressing an enemy. "Bless you,
dear. You sit still while I get your breakfast."

She walked out quickly.

When Laurence came home to dinner Winnie, still dressed in her best, was
alone in the living-room.

"Hello! You've assumed a new rôle," he said from the doorway.

She could see that finding her there made him uncomfortable. She smiled
at him with a kind of happy pain.

He came forward. He was kind and distant. His lips brushed her hair.

She gazed up at him. Her eyes, with crushed back lids and lifted lashes,
melted open for his.

"I don't want to be sick, Laurie. I've got to go away with Mother. You
won't hate me for going away with her? I do need a change so!"

He stood before her with a kind of mocking fatigue, but she saw that he
was sunk deep in himself. She wanted to drag him up.

He shook his head. "I don't know what to say to you lately."

She reached up and laced him with her arms. "Am I so unreasonable? Oh,
Laurie, I don't want to die."

He seated himself helplessly on the arm of her chair. "Why think about
something so improbable as dying?"

"But I might. I want you to care," she whispered.

"Don't you think I care?" His voice had a grating note as he tried to be
light.

"Of course--yes--I guess so. But it's so awful to think about."

"Then don't think of it."

"I can't help it."

Death. The word had not been alive to her until this moment. Suddenly
she heard it about her, whispering like wings. She floated beyond
Laurence, beyond the room.

With a quick intake of breath she shut out terror grown too delicious.

"Then you will let me go away with Mother? You won't stop loving me,
Laurie?"

"I'll shake you for talking nonsense," he said, getting up.

She hated him for escaping her, but her mind was made up and the next
day when her mother called the morning of departure was set.

Settling her pince-nez on her flat nose before her fixed and despairing
eyes, Mrs. Price pressed Winnie's face to her flat black bosom. "I'm so
glad, dear. It was so foolish of my little girl to hold out against
having her parents do anything for her. Your father is so good, Winnie.
There is nothing I can ask for you that he isn't willing to give. You
mustn't deprive him of that pleasure."

Winnie thought of Laurie and was stiff in her mother's embrace, yet at
that moment could not have said which of them was most irritating.

Mrs. Price always avoided Laurence's name.

When Mrs. Price had gone Winnie lay in her room on the couch, excited
and oppressed. She said death to herself, and the word echoed inside her
like a cry down a long hall. Then the echo was lost in the deeps of
darkness. But it continued to quiver below the surface of her life.

Winnie thought of being sick. She was harsh with a knowledge of herself.
She would not be sick. Closing her eyes she imagined her mouth. With a
kind of horror of its own act, it pressed Laurence's. She woke up.

The noonday sun outside was pale with rain. Winnie heard footsteps in
the still noon street. Death. The dancing word fluttered ahead of the
hurrying feet.

Winnie moved fretfully on the couch. She saw Death as the face of an
insistent stranger thrust into her own. Stupid thing which she did not
know. She pushed it aside feebly, feeling for what had meaning to
her--Laurence, Bobby, Mrs. Price.

All at once she realized that Laurence had come home for something and
was in the room. He rummaged at his desk. He was subdued in his
movements, trying not to rouse her. She watched him between half-closed
lids. He was familiar to her. The very crooked set of his thick neck in
his broad shoulders was food to her. Hungrily she opened her eyes wider
and lifted herself to her elbow.

"What's the matter, Laurie?" Her whisper, sharp and sweet, pierced the
somber stillness of the room where the shades had been drawn for her to
rest.

"Hello! I came to get a note book. Did I wake you?" He had started at
the sound of his name, but as he faced her he held himself contained in
his sharp cold smile.

"I don't care. I've been having horrid dreams, Laurie."

"That's a silly thing to do."

"Don't make fun of me. Come sit by me a minute."

"I haven't much time, dear." He came and sat on the edge of the couch.
"Don't you want the shades up? It's so gloomy."

"I want you first. See how cold my hands are!"

She gave him her hands. He took them as though he did not know what to
do with them. His eyes were still full of the brightness of the street
and he could not see her plainly.

"I want you to love me. Oh, Laurie, you do love me!" She groped up his
arms, his cheek, until she had found his mouth. She covered it up with
her hand. She did not want it to speak against her. When he tried to
talk she pulled him down until his eyes pressed her breast. She drew him
deeper into the warm covers on the tumbled couch. She was cold. Her
hands said that he must warm her. Memories of pain were silver veins in
her body. Twisting herself on the couch to bring him nearer, she
wrenched her arm, sharp pang of happiness.

"Love me!" she entreated. Her mouth clung against his. She could feel
the force of his quickening heart beats as though they were her own. The
muscles in his arm twitched under the rough-napped cloth of the sleeve
which brushed her cheek. Her nostrils dilated against his arm. The smell
of his body was bitter. She wanted to drink in the vividness of his
strong live flesh that resisted her.

Around the dimmed squares of the yellow shades, light, entering, made
shining borders. Noises drifted in the light under the bright edges of
the yellow shades. Hammering from the house on the corner reverberated
through the room.

"Winnie! I can't--you mustn't. You're not well enough. You mustn't
excite yourself like this!"

She felt him passive in his resistance. Reluctantly her arms slipped
away. Her resentful eyes shone at him from the gloom with a small and
pointed light.

He leaned away from her, patting her hair as he came gradually to his
feet. He did not want to see her because she made him feel guilty toward
himself. Then he was obliged to look. When he smiled at her he kept her
outside his eyes. He seemed relieved in spite of himself.

"Poor little sick girl," he said as to a child. "I'm glad you're going
away with your mother. We'll give you a nice rest and have you all fixed
up."

"You don't love me!" she said, looking at him stormily.

"Please, Winnie. Things are hard enough." His face was drawn with the
effort of his continued smile.

"You don't." She turned over and closed her eyes.

"Don't be absurd." He joked uncomfortably.

But she would not look at him.

He walked out on tiptoe as though he thought her asleep.

When she knew he was gone she began to cry, and, keeping her eyes
closed, moved her head from side to side and struck into the pillows
with her fist.

Laurence did not go home to dinner, but remained working at the
laboratory until after midnight. As he walked home the city streets,
washed thinly with light, were yet thronged. His mind was sharply intent
on itself. It was like the keel of a ship, parting the swarming life
before it.

But as he drew nearer the place where Winnie was his heart strained. He
felt suffocated. There were women standing in doorways. Their shadows
wove the darkness together and drew it tight about his heart. He hated
his work but the doing of it gave him relief, for it could not enter
him.

The glow from a street lamp fell on his own house--purple-red walls that
held Winnie. The big gilt figures on the transom above the door
glistened on the glass that gave back a blank reflection of the light.
He put in his latch key. The door, swinging away from him, seemed drawn
inward with the pull of the darkness.

It shut ponderously behind him. He hesitated a moment, resisting some
unknown inevitability. It was very still in the dark.

Only the stairs were half revealed by the pallor of the light that came
in high up from the street.

He walked up softly and opened the bedroom door. He could hear a breath
like the respiration of shadow. He knew it was Bobby.

Then somehow he realized that Winnie was awake and holding herself apart
from the dark.

He did not speak. She did not speak. He sat down and began to take off
his shoes.

As he laid the shoes away from him he was aware of her awareness as
though she were seeing him stoop forward in the dark. He had a sense of
his own motion as a pale line etched across a thick surface. When he
unbuckled his belt and began to draw his trousers over his feet he felt
the sharp sweep of his moving arms tearing the quiescence of the room.

He stood up naked. His cold toes gripped the hot nap of the roughened
carpet. He pulled on his pajamas and the white cloth, as it was drawn up
his legs, was cool white fire, that burnt upward from his bare feet.

The room seemed a final blackness into which the dark of the night
outside had flowed and gathered as in a pool. Still feeling himself
burning white in the cool cloth, Laurence walked to the side of the bed
and looked down to see if Winnie were asleep.

Very faintly he saw the rigid line of her body, but through her
nightdress he perceived her tense, like a protest. He could not see her
eyes but he shivered with the feeling that they were very wide open and
sightless. The darkness was against her eyes, holding her rigid upon the
white sheet in the dark bed.

"Laurie!"

"I thought you were asleep." He did not know why he lied.

She did not answer at once and he stood waiting. "Laurie!"

He felt suddenly feverish in his cold clothes.

She reached out and touched him. The feel of her hand flowed along his
hand and up the veins of his arm. He felt as though her hand had been
laid upon his heart. His heart beat quickly. He denied his heart. He was
passive. He stood apart from himself. He was unrelated to Winnie, sick
and tense in the bed.

"Laurie!" she whispered again. She drew him down beside her.

"You are sick, Winnie," he said. Sure of himself, he did not resist her.

She reached up, groping to cover his mouth. It made her angry when he
told her she was sick. She did not want him to build up words between
them. She tried to draw him into herself, into the formlessness of
contact.

"Oh, I can't sleep, Laurie! I want you to love me."

"I do love you, Winnie. If I seem not to love you it is because you are
sick."

"I'm not sick! I won't be sick. You don't love me!"

"I do!"

"Please love me! I'll die if you don't love me, Laurie!"

He resisted her.

She drew his hand to her and placed it like a cup over the swell of her
breast.

He trembled. "Winnie, my darling, we mustn't----"

"Laurie, I'll go mad!"

"Why, Winnie? I love you, Winnie."

But he did not love her. She seemed to him like a sickness. They were
both sick with her.

"Kiss me again."

He kissed her. His palm tingled with the strangeness of her breast.

"I can't let you go 'way from me, Laurie!"

"I don't want to."

She held him. Suddenly she was no longer strange. His hand read the
strangeness of her with the relief of familiarity. She burned him with
wonder.

Winnie felt him yield and was glad, but her triumph congealed in agony.
She fell away from him. She was cold. She was still. The throbbing of
her body came to her like an echo which she could scarcely hear. She had
forgotten the meaning of it. Who was this man? She was afraid.

She waited for him to leave her.

Laurence was tired with the feeling of Winnie that flowed through his
body. She was in his veins degrading him with possession.

If she should have a child. He would not think of it. He walked over to
the couch and climbed upon it. He would not think. Driving his thoughts
from him, as he lay down, he felt the flap of the window shade and the
respiration of Bobby rattling in his empty mind.

He tossed. His body was hot. The sheet he pulled over him made him
shiver. Then he grew cold and longed for the heat to cover him up. He
felt naked. He wanted to lie drowned in heat, miles thick in darkness.

Winnie awoke. It was morning. The room was cool and bright. Sunshine
made the curtains glow. Patches of light shuddered delicately here and
there on the carpet. A spear of sunshine shattered itself on the
looking-glass.

Laurence slept on the couch with one arm tossed up and his head thrown
back. His mouth was open. His face in sleep seemed stupid with pain.
Bobby slept, too, stirring and murmuring a little. Winnie found
something oppressive in the sight of people yet asleep like this in the
full blaze of the sun.

Winnie's mind was clear and calm with the ease that came of sleep, but
in the center of her being there was a dark spot of indecipherable
vividness.

Last night. A dark spot of terror. Laurence had been frightened by what
they had done. She wanted him to be frightened.

Death. If she had a child she would suffer--not he. White and holy, she
felt herself a beautiful stillness in the turmoil of Laurence's
cowardice.

She could not part with this fear. If she had a child Death was her hand
from which he could not escape.

Midnight. The street lamps shone into the bedroom, making bright shadows
of the drawn shades. The bureau, the bed, bits of furniture here and
there, darker than the darkness, reflected the light heavily.

Laurence stood outside the door in the hall. He was trembling, afraid of
his own room. He had stayed away all day because he could not see
Winnie, because he hoped that when he reached home she would be asleep.

It was quiet. He opened the door and stepped inside. The sudden draught
lifted the shades ponderously and let them drop again.

Fresh, clean wind from the quiet midnight street surged into the room.
Light floated in under the lifted shades. It seemed as if the wind, cold
and shining, were washing away the darkness.

Winnie was awake again. Laurence stood still.

He waited a long time. He felt shaken. If I take her again she will die.

He did not believe it. He went toward her with a nausea of relief.
"Die" was the word of a song. It was the strange music of passion that
said die.

He waited by the bed. He wanted her to tell him to go away. He could
feel her still and looking at him.

When he knelt by the bed and reached his arms around her he wanted her
to evade him.

"Winnie?" She trembled when he touched her. He wanted her to speak. But
she was quiet.

She let him kiss her mouth.

Death. His understanding could not hold the vagueness of the strange
escaping word. He felt her thinning from his grasp. His veins swelled
with death.

Then he became the death-giver, glad, in spite of himself, of the
drunkenness of moving with the unseen. Through the banality of sex which
oppressed him, there pushed the will of an exalted and passionate
horror.

He took her. They were dead.

Winnie lay face downward and sobbed. There was no triumph in her now.
She felt herself as if already large with child, heavy and helpless.
Through the darkness of her closed lids she could see, as if before her,
Laurence's coarse and handsome head, his eyes turned toward her with
their strained gaze, and the odd set of his neck that kept his face
always a little to one side. She knew now how much she hated him.

Laurence, walking along the deserted streets, was relieved to find the
long vistas ending in darkness. The night rose high and expressionless
before him. Beyond the dim lights, the violet-blue horizon was a clear
quiet stretch like a lake of glass covered with flowering stars.

His pain was choked in him, suffocated by the quiet.