That night when I heard him stamping off the snow in the hall, I had a hot drink for him, but when I saw him, by the rakish light of the hall lamp, wringing his hands with the cold before taking it, I insisted he should come on into my still warm room. I had to turn back first to light my own lamp and, in respect to my being in my dressing gown with my hair in two braids, to slip into my bedroom and experience, as I looked back at him through the crack in the door, the kind of softening a woman has toward a man she has made comfortable. The light of my lamp, which was shaded for reading, like a miniature calcium, brought out for me the frayed edge of his overcoat and all the waste and misuse of him, the kind of faded appeal that sort of man has for a woman; forlorn as he was, as he put the bowl back on the table, I was so much more forlorn myself that I was glad to have been femininely of use to him. Pauline wrote me to come out and stay with her during the protracted cold spell, but owing to the difficulty in delivery, the invitation failed to reach me until the severity of the weather was abated. In any case I was still too sore at what seemed to me the betrayal of my long confidence, to have been willing to have subjected myself to any reminders of it. And whatever kindness Pauline meant, it could hardly have done so much for me as Leon Griffin did by just needing me. It transpired that he had no stove in his room, and the heat from the register for which we were definitely charged in the rent, scarcely modified the edge of the cold. For the next two or three days we spent much of the time huddled over my stove. Snow ceased to fall on the second day, and nothing moved in our view except now and then the surface of it was flung up by the wind, falling again fountain-wise into the waste of the untrampled housetops that stretched from my window to the icy flat of the lake darkening under a dour horizon. Somehow, though I had never been willing to confess to my friends how poor I was, I made no bones of it with Griff, as I had heard Cecelia call him, a name that seemed somehow to suit the inconsequential nature of our relation better than his proper title. We frankly pooled our funds in the matter of food, which one or another of us slipped out to buy, and cooked on my stove. I took an interest in preparing it, such as I hadn't since the times when I imagined I was helping Tommy on the way to growing rich, and when the room was full of a warm savoury smell and the table pulled out from the wall to make it serve for two, we felt, for the time, restored to the graciousness of living. We fell back on the uses of domesticity, by association providing us with a sense of life going on in orderliness and stability. It came out for me in these moments that it is after all life, that Art needs rather than feeling, and that, to a woman of my capacity, was to be supplied not by innocuous intrigues like Jerry's but by the normal procedure of living.