"I'm hot," he said when they reached 71st Street. "This is a winter suit. If I stop by the house and change, would you mind waiting for me down-stairs? I'll only be a minute." She was happy; the intimacy of his being hot, of any physical fact about him, thrilled her. When they came to the iron-grated door and Anson took out his key she experienced a sort of delight. Down-stairs it was dark, and after he ascended in the lift Dolly raised a curtain and looked out through opaque lace at the houses over the way. She heard the lift machinery stop, and with the notion of teasing him pressed the button that brought it down. Then on what was more than an impulse she got into it and sent it up to what she guessed was his floor. "Anson," she called, laughing a little. "Just a minute," he answered from his bedroom ... then after a brief delay: "Now you can come in." He had changed and was buttoning his vest. "This is my room," he said lightly. "How do you like it?" She caught sight of Paula's picture on the wall and stared at it in fascination, just as Paula had stared at the pictures of Anson's childish sweethearts five years before. She knew something about Paula--sometimes she tortured herself with fragments of the story. Suddenly she came close to Anson, raising her arms. They embraced. Outside the area window a soft artificial twilight already hovered, though the sun was still bright on a back roof across the way. In half an hour the room would be quite dark. The uncalculated opportunity overwhelmed them, made them both breathless, and they clung more closely. It was eminent, inevitable. Still holding one another, they raised their heads--their eyes fell together upon Paula's picture, staring down at them from the wall. Suddenly Anson dropped his arms, and sitting down at his desk tried the drawer with a bunch of keys. "Like a drink?" he asked in a gruff voice. "No, Anson." He poured himself half a tumbler of whiskey, swallowed it, and then opened the door into the hall. "Come on," he said. Dolly hesitated. "Anson--I'm going to the country with you to-night, after all. You understand that, don't you?" "Of course," he answered brusquely. In Dolly's car they rode on to Long Island, closer in their emotions than they had ever been before. They knew what would happen--not with Paula's face to remind them that something was lacking, but when they were alone in the still, hot Long Island night they did not care. The estate in Port Washington where they were to spend the week-end belonged to a cousin of Anson's who had married a Montana copper operator. An interminable drive began at the lodge and twisted under imported poplar saplings toward a huge, pink, Spanish house. Anson had often visited there before.