“Carl, I’ve always known that we’d hafta part sometime,” she said, “only I tried to make believe that I didn’t know it. But I did. We’re too different from each other, Carl, an’ you know so much more than I do an’ you’re so much better than I am. I wanted to hold on to you ’cause I wanted to make you happy, but all the time I knew that we wasn’t meant for each other. O I knew it so well!” “I’m not in any way better than you are,” said Carl. “It’s just that we each want different things from the world. You want to settle down in a home, and polish your kettles, and sing to your children, and blithely wait for your tired husband every night, while I want to write foolish words on slips of paper and escape from the world around me.” “But, Carl, it’ll be so hard for me to leave you,” she said, in the mournful, dazed voice of one who turns away from a stone wall of whose existence he is not quite certain. A tumult of frail inquiries found the corners of her face and lips. Her breasts heaving beneath the blue muslin waist suggested the movements of loosely despairing hands. She sat with Carl on the grass of a park and wept in a barely audible manner as though she were intent upon giving firmer outlines to a blurred and elusive grief. Carl felt a softly potent disgust with himself and life. Human beings--what did they ever bring each other except pain cunningly disguised or reaching for a phantom ecstasy? Now he would be alone again; the slender thread binding him to animated life would snap; while this child, who held a cloud where a brain should have resided, would hide her glimpse of a grotesquely forbidden heaven and plod back to the soothing subterfuges of her world. Flitting lies seducing a black void into an attitude of false friendship. A stumbling urge, mistaking its own drops of perspiring ardor for permanent, actual jewels. As they stood upon the porch of her home she looked at the darkened windows and then clutched the lapels of his coat. “They’re all in bed now,” she whispered. “Carl, I’ve got to have you once more before you go. I’ve got to. Maybe I’m a bad girl, maybe, I don’t know, but I want to hold you again.” “This will be the least thing that I can give you,” said Carl inaudibly as they sat upon the hammock. With great care he tried to form within himself the intensity of a despairing father, drawing the swift incense of motion into a farewell to his child, in the hope that she might be idiotic enough to preserve it afterwards as a tangible comfort. He closed his eyes as he kissed her, a little afraid to look into her face. CHAPTER IX.