“Damn it--I’d like to--” The finger-nails ate into his palms. He hoped that “it” would die--that “it” would be a “six-monther,” so there could be no possibility of its not dying. “Her and I would be--” His ravening speculations tumbled on into giddy chaos. The night was laced with threads of agony, exquisite, racking, prolonged, still prolonged. Va Di reached out and gripped either edge of the roof, as if to keep himself from sliding. He pleaded with it to stop. The interstices among the leaves of the overhanging willows were filled with the gore of imminent day; Ma Deutra’s rooster crowed in his hollow house away down a flushing lane. But still that haggard utterance hung over the world. It ceased. A faint breeze came to life and wandered across the back yards, tumbling papers; a lark, as though bribed and timed, mounted into the sky and whistled his morning triumph; Va Di’s head sank down on his arms, his knees caved in to rest against the side of the sty, and his fingers fell out flat on the shingles. He opened his eyes by and by to find Rosie Courier standing in the horizontal radiance of the sun, regarding him from the other side of the pen. Her face was the color of a dusty boot, lifeless and flabby. “She wants to see you,” she said. “Who? _Her?_” She nodded stiffly, allowed the thick, mottled lids to droop over her eyes, and turned back toward the kitchen door. Va Di followed. In the kitchen Baldy Minn sat beside the sink, her hands working in a huge blossom of suds. The tight little nubbin of hair had shaken down off the bald spot, lending her a curious expression of wildness. “Was it--did--” Va Di groped for words. “Did it live, Baldy Minn?” “Did it _live_?” Her eyes rolled in their liquor, her whole person quivered and dashed against its margins, and she grinned at him, closing the rent in her teeth with a meaning tongue-tip “Did it _live_? Ho-ho-ho!” He turned away and followed Rosie Courier through a dark passage, smelling of life and death, and entered a room full of sunshine. Within the door a profound embarrassment laid hold of him; he shifted from foot to foot and looked down at the great hat revolving in his hands. Mamie was so white and still and all eyes, and the eyes dwelt upon him with such a spent and inscrutable adoration. He was afraid to look at her; he felt curiously like a figure done in clay, destructible and worthless. Her hand, all the opacity burned out of it, lay on the flowered “comfortable,” and remembering suddenly how it came out to him from last night’s window, he fell down on his knees and laid his cheek against it and wept the tears of weakness. “Mamie,” he sobbed in the wadding. “You’re a good girl, M-m-mamie.”