Chapter VII: Part III (3)

He was thinking now of young Goode's wife, who, before her marriage was a year old, had run away with another man. Two days previously Charles had met young Goode in the street. To keep from listening to any reminiscence of the affair, Charles had talked to him rapidly in a jocular voice and taken him off to his club to give him a drink.

Charles turned in the bed, groaned, and hid his face. If only Catherine were far away! Had gone abroad for a trip, or something like that! He believed that the emotion he experienced when he held Julia in his arms or knelt with his head in her lap was unlike anything that had ever before come to him. He felt that through Julia he had discovered qualities in himself by which he could lift himself from the banal plane where he had been placed by others. The imposed acceptance of limitations had humiliated him. It was not so much Julia that he was afraid of losing, as the quality within him which he felt she alone could evoke. He knew his own weakness too well. If, at this crisis, he could not bring himself to initiate a change, the miracle which was present would lose its potency, and he would be convicted forever of the triviality which his friends saw in him.

Charles rose to a sitting posture and threw off his coat. When he lay down again he covered his eyes with his stubby fingers. The revealed lower portion of his florid face was harsh and drawn. He could count the pulse jumping in his temples where his hands pressed. His weak lips, unconscious of themselves, looked shriveled with unhappiness. As the tears came under his lids and slipped down his cheeks, his chin shook, and he made a grimace like a contorted smile. All his gestures were cumbersome and pathetic. He wanted the love that would not despise his indecisions. At this moment he feared that even Julia might not be equal to it.

He despised his cowardice, yet had a certain pride in the frankness of his self-confession. Christianity, in his mind, had to do with sanctimonious Puritanism. He resisted with disgust what he understood to be the Christian conception of humility. But he wanted to trust people and lay himself at their feet. Not all--one woman's feet.

There was nothing else for it! His thoughts were betraying him. He had to have alcohol. He rolled to one side of the bed, tore his collar open, and staggered to his feet. Already, the resolution to indulge himself softened the clash of uncertainties. When he had gone to a cellarette, and taken a drink from a decanter there, his misery grew warm and sweet. His body was inundated in the hot painful essence of his own soul. He was helpless and at ease, bathed in himself.

Standing by the window, he watched the cold small moon rising above the houses on the other side of the street. Strange and alone in whiteness, it flashed above the dark roofs that glistened with a purplish light. Charles, startled by the poesy of his own mood, compared it to a piece of shattered mirror reflecting emptiness. He was ingenuously surprised by his imaginings. Staring, with his large naïve eyes, at the glowing moon in the profound starless sky, he was convinced of an incredible beauty in everything, but particularly in himself.

* * * * *

Paul knew that in a fortnight he was expected to be away at college. Without having spoken to any one of his resolve, he had decided on rebellion. Of late he had been a regular attendant at industrial gatherings. When he talked to Socialists, Communists, or even people with anarchistic leanings, he was conscious of making himself absurd with the illogical violence of his remarks. He felt that he was continually doing himself an injustice, for almost everything he said suggested that he was taking the side of the oppressed only to gratify a personal spite. At the same time, he confessed to himself that the revolution pleased him doubly when it emphasized the triviality and complacency of women like Julia and her friends, who titillated their vanity by trifling with matters which concerned the actual life and death of a huge, semi-submerged class.

On one occasion he listened to the tempestuous speech of a young Rumanian Jewess, and was exalted by the mere passion of her words, irrespective of their content. It seemed beautiful to him that this young woman, under the suspicion of the police, was able to express her faith with such utter recklessness. He wished that he too might endanger himself. He hated the bourgeois comfort of his uncle's home. In order to achieve such righteous defiance it was necessary to suffer something at the hands of the enemy. Instead of running away to sea, as he had at first planned, he decided that he ought to go into a factory to work, and live in a low quarter of the city. There was Byronic pleasure in imagining the loneliness that would be his lot. His desperation would be a rebuke to those who despised him as a credulous youth. Above everything, he wanted to be poor and socially lost. When he was at home, his uncle nagged him and his aunt watched him continually with curiosity and resentment. She thought he was lazy, that he lounged about the streets and was untidy in his dress.

Paul haunted slums where sex in its crudest form was always manifest. He treasured his aversion to it. The deeper understanding of life had lifted him above its necessities. He was never so much in the mood to enter the battle for industrial right, in utter disregard of selfish interests, as after resisting an appeal to what he termed his elemental nature. Then he became impatient of his exclusion from present dangers.

At last he was introduced to the Rumanian Jewess he had so much admired. But when he saw that she was interested in men, and even something of a coquette, it filled him with repugnance. He observed much in her that he had not taken account of before. There was something coarse and sensual in her heavy figure. Her skin, that was dark and oily, now appeared to him unclean. And in her friendly eyes, with their look of frank invitation, he discovered a secret depravity. This made him question the need to merge his sense of self in the impersonal self of the working class. It seemed certain that, to remain pure for leadership, he must live apart.

* * * * *

In the vague morning street figures passed dimly on their way to work. The sun, half visible, melted in pale rays that trembled on the wet roofs of houses. The diffused shadows lay on the pavements in transparent veils. Julia, on her way to the laboratory, saw Paul walking in front of her, stooping, a tall, awkward figure with a cap pulled over its face. She called, "Paul!" She noticed that he hesitated perceptibly before he glanced back. In her state of mind she felt rebuked for everything that went wrong around her. Paul's hesitation challenged her conscience.

He turned and awaited her approach. She took his cold limp fingers. He seemed shy--almost angry--and would not look at her. "May and I have missed you, Paul. Were you trying to run away from me?" A moment before hearing her voice he had felt worldly and old and self-possessed. He hated himself because, at the time, she always obliged him to believe in her estimate of him rather than his own. He walked along beside her with his hands in his pockets, his head lowered. "Until I met your aunt the other day I thought you had taken the long voyage you were always talking about. We haven't been such bad friends that we deserve to be ignored, have we?"

Paul said, "I haven't been to see anybody."

She thought his reserve sulky. "Aren't you going to college in a few days?"

Paul turned red. He was all against her. "I think a lot of college is a waste of time."

"I suppose it is, but one might waste time much more disastrously."

"I feel that going to college would be hypnotizing myself for four years so I wouldn't know what real people were doing."

"Surely there are some real people in college!"

"Well, they manage to hide themselves. No college professor would ever let you know that there was such a thing as a class struggle going on!"

Poor child! Why is he so angry! "I see you're still very much interested in economics."

"Well, I haven't much use for the theoretical side of it."

"I thought economics was all theory."

Paul's intolerance scarcely permitted him to answer her. Most women, who go in for making the world right over a cup of tea, do! "If anything good comes to the working people of this country it will be through direct action." He could not go on. His words suffocated him. He knew that she was cursing him once more with the sin of youth. "I can't expect people who don't know anything about actual conditions to agree with me." His trembling hands fumbled helplessly in his pockets. It was all dim between them. Love. I must love the world. She has never suffered. It was almost as if she must suffer before he could go on with what he believed. The world that was old seemed stronger and harder than he could bear. People work because they must starve otherwise. She goes to work that is only another diversion. They die. I could die. Dead beast. Beauty and the beast. His heart was like a stone.

Julia, watching him as they walked, saw his gullet move in his long stooped neck. Poor awkward child! "I like you for feeling all this, Paul. I used to feel the same things."

"I suppose you don't believe in them now!"

"I'm afraid I don't, Paul--not entirely. So many people have tried." She was jealous of the child's illusion, but at the same time complacently sad. He doesn't know me. The boy doesn't know me. Pity, baby, Dudley, Charles, Laurence.

"It wouldn't be hopeless if they didn't all pat themselves on the back for being disillusioned."

"What would you think then if I said I envied you?" She loved him for misjudging her. It magnified the importance of her loneliness. They were at a crossing where they must part. "Are you going this way?" What makes the child look at me like that! He's unhappy. Paul said, "No." "Then you'll come to see us--come to see May and me?" His hand did not take hers, only permitted her grasp. She smiled and went on, feeling that she was leaving something behind that she had meant to keep.

He remembered her eyes, proud and humble at the same time, that asked of him. As she left him it was as if he were dying. I must love some one! He thought of her soul, a physical soul, meager and abandoned. All at once an unasked thing possessed him. I love her! He was sick with sudden terror and surprise. He walked blindly, jostling people he met. She takes everything beautiful out of my life! His hands clenched in his pockets. No. When he said love, he meant hate.

The Indian girl walked down the grass to the ship. The waves, pale and white-crested, parted before her. The waves were like white breasts lying apart waiting for him. It was cold in the sea. She wants to kill me. Now he knew what was meant by death--beautiful in coldness. White breasts like sculptured things. They were so still he could lie in them forever. Death. The peace of perfection. In the cold pure sky quivered the thin rays of stars. The end of life. I love her, not beautiful--her weak body torn by life.

No, no, no! He could not endure it. Seas paler, and paler still. Not beautiful. The water ran out forever. Dawn, and the empty sands like glowing shadows of silk. A sandpiper flying overhead made dim reflections of himself. With flashings of heavy light, the water unrolled, and sank back from the beach.

* * * * *

Charles made repeated unsuccessful efforts to see Julia. It was a long time before he was willing to be convinced that she was avoiding him. When he finally realized it, he felt that he had been going toward a place which seemed beautiful, but that when he stood in it there was only emptiness. The emptiness was in him, hard, like a light which disclosed nothing but its own brightness. He hated, but the emotion had no particular object, for, by its very intensity, even Julia was obliterated. There was nothing but himself, a thing frozen in a brilliance which blinded its own eyes. If he could have felt anything definite against her it would have been easier. To stop hating the emptiness, he began to drink more heavily. If he permitted himself to seek an object through which his suffering could be expressed he reverted to Catherine. He must keep away from that. I mustn't hurt her. Poor old girl. It's not right.

He found that his repugnance to Catherine had become so acute that, to keep himself from saying and doing irretrievable things, it was necessary to escape the house and her presence. By God, it's rotten! She's stood by me. I've got to be good to her.

In his rejuvenated conception of his wife he exaggerated both her acuteness and her capacity for suffering. It now appeared to him that she had immolated herself on the altar of an ideal of which he was the embodiment. She's loved me. She's always loved me. I don't know what's the matter with me. Christ, what a rotten world this is!

Then her small face rose up before him in all its evasive pleasantness. He hated the faded prettiness of it; the withered look of her throat; the velvet band she wore about her neck to make herself appear younger when she was in evening dress. He hated her delicate characterless hands that were less fresh than her face. The very memory of her rings oppressed him. She was always so richly yet so discreetly dressed. Such perfect taste. She had a way of seeming to call attention to other people's bad breeding. He remembered the glasses she put on when she read and hated the look of them on her small nose. The little grimace she made when she laughed. Her verbal insistence on sensible footgear and the feeling he always had that her shoes were too small for her. The quizzical contempt with which she baffled him. Her sweet severe smile behind which she concealed herself.

My God, I've got to. I've got to. When he realized that the recollection of Julia was coming into his mind he went somewhere and took another drink. It was hot and quieting. Warm sensual dark in which he could hide himself. Julia was something bright and glassy that stabbed his eyes. He put her out like a light. He held fast to his sense of sin. He had to torture himself with reproaches to make it seem worth while to go back to his wife.

* * * * *

Charles tried to immerse himself in business. This was the one province in which he could act without hesitations. He called it, "playing the game". The atmosphere of trade hardened him. He had unconsciously absorbed some of his wife's contempt for the details of money making. Where he was not permitted to be sentimental, he luxuriated in a callousness of which he was incapable in his intimate life.

Day after day, scrupulously dressed, he sat in his office, an expensive cigar between his lips, preserving to his associates what would be called a "poker face". If he were able to get the best of any one--especially through doubtful and unanticipated means--it gave him an illusion of power which tempted him later to prolific benevolence. He had begun life as a telegraph operator in a small town. He deserted this profession to go into trade. At one time he was a small manufacturer. Later he sold mining stock, and promoted a company that ultimately failed. His first success had come when he went into the lumber industry, and he had recently become possessed of some oil fields that were making him rich.

Charles never felt pity for any one who was on a financial equality with himself. He would fleece such a man without a qualm. He distrusted Socialists, tolerated trade unions with suspicion, but was sorry for "the rough necks". Poor devils! I know what it's like. We're all of us poor devils. He loved to think of himself as one who, through sheer force of initiative, had risen despite unusual handicaps. By gosh, before I get through I'm going to be quits with the world! At least we can keep the women out of this--! Damned muck!

In the flush of unscrupulous conquest, his eyes glistened with triumph. His gestures were harshly confident. He looked young and happy. If, at such times, he encountered women, they found his mixture of simplicity and ruthlessness particularly ingratiating.

* * * * *

In the street Charles remembered a small niece whom he had not thought of for a long time. Brother's kid. I'll send her something. His brother was a poor man working on a small salary. Charles wanted to do something generous that would help him to think well of himself. God, what a fool I am! He walked along briskly with his hat off, looking insolent and debonair. When an acquaintance passed in a motor car a jovial greeting was exchanged. To make himself oblivious to the resentment which was in the memory of Julia, Charles dwelt elaborately on the memory of other women. Blanche, damn her! I'll have to go and see her again. One hand around the old boy's neck and the other in his pocket. He tried to keep away from the center toward which his thoughts converged. What price life! Hell! (In the depths of me, this awful despair. Horror, horror, horror. Something clutched and dragged him into himself.) He stretched his neck above his collar and passed his finger along the edge. (Some woman's throat white like that. Bent back. Lilies on a windy day. I shall die.)

Young Goode coming toward him. Goode thinking, Here's that unmoral innocent. He'll live forever. Hurst's a bounder. Damn well-meaning ass.

They stood on the street corner gossiping. Young Goode's brown eyes desponded from boredom. Very handsome. A black mustache. His nose almost Greek. His head empty--only a few clever thoughts. "Hello, Hurst." "Hello, Goode, old chap. Yes, going out to Marburne to-morrow--Wilson and his wife. How are you? What do you think of the election? Glad that crook, Hallowell, got kicked out."

Goode said he was thinking of turning Bolshevist. His smile was self-appreciative. Ludicrous!

"Well, I hope not. Haven't come to that yet. But the patriotism of some of these ward heelers is pretty thin. Yes--hope we'll see you."

They moved apart. Young Goode grew small in distance. A dark vanishing speck down the glaring street. Christ, what a hot day! Charles mumbled over some obscene expressions. I don't want to think. (Catherine, lilies, white and beautiful neck.)

Charles had gone all the way to town on foot. In front of the building where his office was located he encountered Mr. Wilson. "Hello! Hello! What do you think of this for the beginning of fall? Hot, eh? About time for another drink? Yes, going out to your wife's new place. Kate says it's quite a buy. Not yours? What's a husband now-a-days! Superfluous critter. Endured but not wanted."

Mr. Wilson's eyes were twinklingly submerged between his fat cheeks and bulging brows. He hadn't time for a drink. He wanted to talk business before he left town. He chuckled at everything Charles said. His full cheeks quivered and his neat belly shook in the opening of his coat. Charles was wary of unqualified approbation, but the more suspicious he became the more easy and Rabelaisian was his conversation. "Well--well--well, Hurst! I'll be--" Mr. Wilson actually suffered in delight.

They had seated themselves in Charles's inner room, a handsome heavy desk between them. Charles gazed with cold innocent eyes at the laughing fat man opposite.

When Mr. Wilson had gone Charles opened a cupboard and took out a bottle. In business hours he was very moderate in his indulgence.

A long white road, just empty, going nowhere. The car jumped to his touch. How cool and still it had been in the woods at evening when he and Julia drove home. That's beautiful. Myself beautiful, wanting to be loved. Fat old fool. Little children, little children, come unto me.

My God, he said out loud, I'm getting a screw loose. Growing senile! Julia--that hurts. I can't think of that. Kate, poor girl!

All day he felt as though the memory of some pathetic death had made him kind.

* * * * *

At last Paul had made up his mind to run away. His interest in the revolution had waned. What do I think? May--that Farley woman. I don't know. His emotions had betrayed him. Where am I? I don't know anything. I don't know myself. He was unhappy, afraid that some one would discover for him that his unhappiness also was absurd. His aunt, and Uncle Archie, were intimate with the things that made his thoughts. He wanted to go away, overseas, to know things which their recognitions had never touched. When he was a part of foreign life they would not be able to reach his thoughts. He wanted to put his wonder into things that were dark to them.

There were days when he spent all his free time among the docks. He edged into the vast obscurity of warehouses. Red-necked men, half dressed, were pushing trucks about. When they shouted orders to each other their voices echoed in the twilight of dust and mingled odors in the huge sheds. Through an opening, far off, Paul saw the side of a ship, white, on which the sun struck a ray like light on another world. There was a porthole in the glaring fragment of hull. The porthole glittered. The strip of water below it was like twinkling oil.

He made friends with a petty officer of a Brazilian freight boat who took him aboard for a visit. On the machine deck Paul saw sailors' clothes spread out to dry. With the smell of hot metal and grease was mingled the odor of fresh paint. He leaned over one of the ventilators and the air that came out of it almost overpowered him.

From where he stood he could see the city distantly. Here and there a tower radiated, or a gilded cornice on a high roof flashed through the opacity of smoke. When he faced the sun the glow was intolerable, but he turned another way and watched a world that looked drowned in light. The ships were crowded along the docks as if they were on dry land. Masts and smoke stacks bristled together. The harbor, filled with tugs and barges, seemed to have contracted so that the farthest line of shore was only a hand's throw away.

He listened to the creaking of hawsers and the shouts in foreign tongues. When the wind turned toward him, the strong oily fragrance of the sacks of coffee that were being unloaded over the gang plank pervaded everything. The wind touched him like the hand of a ghost. Gulls with bright wings darted through the haze to rest for an instant amidst the refuse that floated in the brown fiery water.

Down in the engine room something was burring and churning. The water rose along the ship's side with a hiss of faint motion, and descended again as if in stealthy silence. Nothing but the lap, lap of tiny waves succeeding one another. As if the sun's rays had woven a net about it, the water was caught again in stillness. It was a transfixed glory like the end of the world.

I shall die. I shall never come back. Inside Paul was like a light growing dim to itself, going on forever in invisible distance. When he contemplated leaving everything he knew, he followed the disappearing light, and when it died away he belonged to the strange lands which wanted him like dreams. The river and the city, dim and harsh at the same time, had the indefiniteness which allowed him to give himself to them. He was in them, in smoke and endless distance. He listened to the hoarse startling whistles of tugs, the shrill whistles of factories blowing the noon hour on land, the confusion of voices that rose from the small boats clustered about the ship's stern.

Going away. Dying. I shall be dead of light, not known. Fear of the unknown. There is only fear of the known, he said to himself, the known outside. The unknown is in me. He wondered what he was saying, growing up. Mature. He felt as if he had already gone far, far away, beyond the touch of the familiar things one never understood. The strange was close. It was his.

* * * * *

May felt herself lost in pale endless beauty of which Aunt Julia was a part. Love in the darkness. Love in her own room at night when she was alone and hugged her pillow to her wet face. Through the window she saw the trees in the street leaning together and mingling their odd shadows. An arc light was a blurred circle through the branches and the stiff leaves shaking and dropping occasionally to earth. When she was unseen she could give herself. If they saw her, they shut her in. Now she was everywhere, wanted, dark in the dark street. She could see a star above the roof and she was in the star filled with thin light. She felt as if she were dying of love, dying of happiness. Happy over a world which was beautiful because she loved it. She loved Paul, but he was only a part of the secret city--a part of everything. She did not want to think of him too much. Jesus, everything, she said. I'm Jesus. She shivered at her blasphemy, and was glad. I'm Jesus! I'm Jesus! The leaves rattled against the window pane and fell into the dark street. It was too bright. She drew herself up in a knot and hid her face.

* * * * *

It was a hot night. Bobby was excited and cross. He was going away to school the next day. His two trunks stood open on the floor of his room. Outside the windows the dry leaves rustled in the murky night. Some rain drops splattered against the lifted glass. Then there was silence, save for the occasional rattle of twigs in the darkness. An automobile slipped by with the long soft sound of rubber tires sucking damp asphalt. When the branches of the trees parted, the lights in the house opposite seemed to draw nearer. Bobby disliked their spying.

He clattered up and down the stairs and through the halls in the still house where one could hear the clocks tick.

Depressed and resentful, Julia had kept herself from the boy and his preparations. He encountered her outside his door. She was passing quietly, trying not to be seen. "Gee whizz, Aunt Julia, I haven't got anybody to help me!" Julia realized that she was hypocritical in her determination to keep away from him. "I don't see why you can't help me, Aunt Julia."

Julia clasped her long pale fingers together in front of her black dress. She smiled. Bobby doesn't know! Oh, Laurence, how can you! "Hadn't you better do it alone, Bobby? Then you'll know where everything is." She was thinking how proud his throat looked above his open collar. His sun-burned neck was full and slender like a flower calyx. She found something pathetic in his small hard face: his short straight nose, his sulky mouth, his round chin, his eyes that saw nothing but their own desires. She loved him. He hurt her so, hard beautiful little beast. She walked through the door, into his domain that recalled his school pennants and baseball bats. "What a trunk! You haven't left room for clothes, child."

"Well, gee whizz, Aunt Julia, I've got to take my boxing gloves and my hockey sticks, and there's not anything in yet." She crouched by the trunk and began to lift his treasures from it. "I'm afraid this will all have to be taken out."

Bobby stepped on her trailing skirt as he peered into the trunk. "Gosh, Aunt Julia, it's so long!" He added, "You're so darn slow."

"Have you asked May to help you?"

"Gosh, Aunt Julia, I don't want her! She never will help me anyway."

"I'm afraid you don't help her very much." Julia glanced over her shoulder. Her smile apologized for her severity.

"Well, gee, when she wants me to help her it's always some fool girl's thing. She's not going away to school."

Laurence, climbing the stairs slowly, heard their talk. He had hidden himself for the evening, and was on his way to bed. He went to the door and looked in. Julia saw him, and clambered to her feet, tripping over her skirt. Laurence concentrated his attention on Bobby. "Not through yet?"

"Well, darn it, Dad, I've got to get everything in these two measly little trunks. I just can't do it."

Laurence came forward. "Oh, yes, you can." He squatted beside the heap of clothes. Julia stepped back like an intruder. She watched his hands, with their gestures of delicacy and tension, moving among the scattered objects. His sweet sneer seemed graven on his face. Everything about him, his clumsy humped shoulders, the spread of his hams straining the cloth of his trousers, was full of her knowledge of him that he would not admit. Bobby ran about the room bringing things to his father. Rain fluttered out of the darkness and made threads of motion on the silvered glass. "You'd better shut that window, Bobby." Bobby struggled with the sash. "Gee whizz, Dad, it's so hot in here!"

Julia wanted to leave them, but could not. She felt blank, and excluded, as though they had thrust her out into the obliviousness of the night. She was tired of the disorder of her inner life, but there was an intoxication in desperation vivid enough to make remembered peace seem dead and unreal. The only peace she could look forward to would come in going on and on to the numbness of broken intensity. When one became God, one destroyed in order to accomplish one's godhead. By destruction one brought everything into one's self. But she was heavy with the everything that she had become. It was too much. Only Laurence remained outside her. He would not have her. He was more than she, because he would not take her and become her. Love could not annihilate him. She understood the strategy of crucifixion, but could not accomplish it.

Laurence was rising stiffly to his feet. "Better, eh?"

Bobby was grudgingly appreciative. "There's a lot more. I'm much obliged. I guess it's all right."

Laurence settled his cuffs about his wrists and, drawing out a crumpled handkerchief, brushed dust from his small hands. "Well, that will do until morning anyway. Anything we can't find room for we'll send after you. You'd better get to bed now."

Julia said, "Good-night, Bobby, dear." "Good-night." Bobby did not see her face. "Good-night, Robert." "'Night, Dad."

Julia followed Laurence out. Still he did not look at her. He was relieved by the certainty of Bobby's departure, and willing to acknowledge that he owed Julia some compensation. "Well, I suppose we'll miss the kid."

"I shall." They were before Julia's door. She hesitated with her hand on the knob. "Won't you come in and talk to me a minute, Laurence?" He avoided her eyes again and stiffened weakly to resist her tone. "Pretty late, isn't it?" He noted her trembling lips. I can't bear that mouth. "Isn't it time you got to sleep?" "I can't sleep."

Then he had to meet her gaze. He was lost in it. He smiled wryly. "All right." With a sense of groping, he followed her in. He wanted the strength to keep her out of his life forever. When she exposed her misery to him, it was as if she were showing him breasts which he did not desire.

Julia said, "Sit down, won't you, Laurence? I feel almost as if you had never been here." Why did she treat him like a guest! He knew her suffering gaze was fixed on him steadily. Laurence, self-entangled, was ashamed to defend himself. He hated her because he loved her. He was jealous of the virgin quality of his pain, and he must give it up for her to ravage in a shared emotion. It was as if her hands, sensually understanding, were reaching voluptuously for his heart.

"You've changed your furniture around." He fumbled in his pocket for a cigar. Julia was closer. He could feel her movement closer to him. He could no longer hide himself.

Julia knelt by the side of his chair. "Are you sending Bobby off to get him away from me, Laurie?"

I shall have to look at her. I can't! I can't! "What an idea, Julia!"

"Laurie, don't punish me! It's killing me to be shut out of your life."

His head was bent over his unlit cigar, as he rolled it endlessly in his fingers. A tear splashed on his hand--his own tear. He wondered at it. He was helpless. "Laurie, my darling! I love you, whether you love me or not!" She was pressing his head against her. His lost head. It lolled. It was hers. Everything was hers. She had taken him, and was exposing his love for her. This would be the hardest thing to forget. Could he ever forget? He gave himself limply to her exultance. "You've killed me, Julia. What is there to forgive? Yes, I love you. I love you." They leaned together. How easily she cries! They love each other. "Oh, Laurie, my darling, my darling! Thank you! Thank you!" She was kissing his hands. He writhed inwardly. My God, not that! Even _I_ can't bear it! "Don't, Julia. Please don't." "I want to be yours, Laurie--oh, won't you let me be yours?" "Julia, I'm anything. I'm broken. I don't know." He was weeping through his fingers. She pulled them apart, and pressed her lips to his face and his closed eyes.

After a time they were calm. She was tender to his humiliation. When he lit the cigar which he had recovered from the floor, she sat at his feet and smiled. He recognized his need of her now. It was dull and persistent. Yes, God forbid that I should judge anybody. I love her.

"Laurie?"

"Julia?" His furtive eyes admitted the sin she put on them.

"Dear Laurie! I love you so much."

Unacknowledged, each kept for himself a pain which the other could not heal. Each pitied the other's illusion, and was steadied by it into gentleness.

THE END