I walked home that night, in remembrance of that first miserable walk away from that studio, and because I like to be happy in the exact places where I have been miserable. I wanted to be alone for a little while, too, to think out what had happened. And all the way home that night, and all the evening when I did no work, the thing which kept recurring to me was the magic of a universe in which herrings and the absence of black sateen aprons permit immortal beings to draw a little nearer to each other. The days were all happy. That combination of fellowship and its humor, together with a complete impersonality which yet exquisitely takes account of all human personality and variously values it, was something which I had never before known in any man. I had not, in fact, known that it was in the world. It is exceedingly rare--yet. Most women die without knowing that it does occasionally exist. But it presages the thing which lies somewhere there, beyond the border of the present, beside which the spectacle of romantic love _without it_ will be as absurd as chivalry itself. I used to think, in those first days, how gloriously democratic love would make us--if we would let it. I understood history now--from the time of the first man and woman! Not a cave man, not a shepherd on the hills, not a knight in a tournament, but that I understood the woman who had loved him. It was astonishing, to have, all of a sudden, not only the Eloises and Helens clear to me--they have been clear to many--but also every little obscure woman who has ever watched for a man to come home. And it wasn't only that. It was that I understood so much better the woman of now. Women in cars and in busses, shoppers, shop-women, artists, waitresses, char-women, "great" ladies--none of them could deceive me any more. No snobbery, no hauteur, no superiority, no simplicity could ever trap me into any belief that they and I were different. If they loved men, then I know them through and through. "Mrs. Bingy," I said to her one night, "did you ever love Mr. Bingy much?" She was re-setting the pins in her pillow and she looked over at me with careful attention. "Well," she said, "they was a good many of us to home, you know; and I didn't have much to do with; and I really married Keddie to get a home. But of course, afterward I got fond of him. And then to think of us now!" "But you really didn't love him when you married him?" "No," she said. "It's a terrible thing to own up to." And there again was the whole naked problem, as I had seen it for her, for Lena, for my mother, for all the women of Katytown, for Mrs. Carney, for Rose.... What was the matter? When love was in the world for us all, when at some time every one of us shared it--what was the reason that it came to this? Or--as I had seen almost as often--to the model "happy" home, which often bred selfishness and oblivion?