For they have not protested more. Their will is shallow: quickly they are at the end of their will. Mother’s thoughts steal back to her easy chair and to her cigarette and to her badinage with Doctor Stein. Father has pulled two huge cigars from his case which he claps shut: he offers one to Mr. Fayn who takes it. In Philip’s eyes, there is a growing gayety of promise as he looks at the milkwarm skin of Mildred. The hurt of their shallow will moves me to lightness. It is as if, in asserting for myself the inconsequence of what I am to do, their negative permission will become less cold and cruel. “I’ll not be long,” I say: my voice sounds high. “I’ll be back ... never fear ... I’ll be back.” Mildred’s eyes for the first time leave mine as if my words released them. She looks at Philip. She is very close to him, and her face upturns to his. Her little breasts alert in the green sheer of her gown are very close to Philip. Her smile flowers near him. She whispers, and they turn away from me.... I open the door. The light from the room tongues into the dark distance and is lost. I look back. Mother and Doctor Stein are chatting, she takes his cigarette and lights her own from it. Father beside Mr. Fayn suggests a play of the cards. Mildred and Philip are side by side: her guitar lies at her feet. --They have forgotten me? I shut the door. I am in the black hall. * * * * * There is a blacker dark than that of the starless night, there is a blacker dark than that of the mountain. It is the black of this hall. Those were a dark outside that my sense invaded. This is a dark that is invading me, that will fill me, choke me, if I stay in it long. It will drive out from the frail shell of my mind any light. Black hall, you must be gone through! I press a finger underneath my brow, against the lashes of my eye: I cannot see it. This dark is immobile, so I must move. No gray tinges it, no stir of light. It is packed density. It fights against my knowledge that it is but a hall ... a hall to be passed through, a hall at whose other end as at the end I have entered, is a door. My will saves me from the sense that this invading black is infinite. I make my hands fumble along the walls: their path is a white tracing that all my body joyously obeys. I fumble at a door. It opens out. And the compressed immensity of the hall blows me into a room, blows the door shut.... There is one window, and the black of the night pours in, gray. I face this window at the room’s far end, and my eyes drink its grayness with an uncanny thirst. This room seems but a bellying out of the hall. At either side of me, blank walls. The room is long, for that single window is far away, or it is very small.