A dingy vestibule, a double row of plates, brass on chipped plaster, woodwork greasy brown.... As I press sharp on the bell ... the gas light was low in a shade dim with dirt ... I hope there is to be no answer. No answer. I turned to go. The door clicks like a word, ordering me about. The hall is black reek. I stumble on the stairs. At the first triangular landing, crimson carpet strip, two doors formed the legs. I passed them to mount still higher. The left door opened and a narrow form stood framed in the gap. I saw a long hand, I saw eyes. They looked at me and the hand widened the gap of the door. The door shut me in with blackness and with her whom I knew there beside me. I could feel her move down the corridor. I followed. Her footsteps were like gray in the hall’s black hush. I did not hear my own. A portière parted, we stood in a large room flush with the rails of the “L”. Between the brown bare floor and the plaster above that dipped and swelled a bit about the chandelier, the furniture stood sheer: dimensional impacts within the cave-like air. A long table faced the windows. On its either side was a chair upholstered red. In the corner was a piano and on the stool, twirling about to face us, sat a boy. He was thin and white. He arose. Mrs. Landsdowne twined a boney arm about his shoulder. “This is a son of mine,” she broke her silence. The white creature glanced away from her dark thrust ... passed me ... the portières seemed not to part for him but to blot him out in an eclipse. The chandelier was not lighted. A student’s lamp cast a pale flush on the table. A train, crowding of steel and wheel and wood, avalanched past: by it the hollow room with its dense things was lifted into dance, a moment’s frenzy that died down, leaving the room a pregnant atmosphere for this sharp woman. She drew down the shades, she took the seat nearer the window; she waved me to face her in the chair across the table. I saw her: I asked myself if her protracted silence was designed that I might see her, or that she see me. “John Mark,” she murmured, “John Mark. That is clear. And a zigzag route your coming, strange for a sober and determined man. But you’re not sober. Drunk with thought and with fasting. Down from a street that is east to an open Square. What draws you, drives you ... a cloud on the open Square. Zigzag. West ... north ... east ... north ... west. Wandering. A crucifix of pain rising from that smoke of the open Square. North and south, the tree: west and east your arms. You dangle. Such young flesh! Why did you come here?”