It was difficult to put into words what they experienced, but sometimes they groped about to find expression for it. “Ain’t it strange?” he said. “When I open that door and come down the steps, it’s more than just a door opening. It’s--it’s something in myself. I open the door, and I see you sitting there under the light, and--someway--I find myself when I find you. It’s like when I was a kid and used to be scared in the dark. We lived in the country then, and sometimes they’d send me down to the stable on errands after nightfall. Coming back, the dark’ud all close in on me. I’d be so scared, I’d seem to be getting smaller and smaller an’ bein’ smothered. I’d run an’ stumble over things. An’ then all at once, I’d see the light from the kitchen, and folks moving about inside, and everything’d be all right. The dark would kind of draw off. I’d open all up inside, like I’d been set free. An’ that’s the way it is when I come down the steps an’ see you sitting here. It’s like I’d come home. I’m a bigger person down here in this sitting-room than I am anywhere else. I mean to say,” he hesitated, turning the thought over, “there’s more of me here than anywhere else.” “But it’s there all the time: I mean, what you really are is there, no matter where you are,” she interrupted. “Maybe so, but it don’t come out other places. You’ve got the key, Miss Julie. I’ve got the key to the door, but you’ve got the key to what I am.” But for the most part they did not attempt to phrase it, accepting it simply and easily. They had been cramped and terrified, constricted into their smaller selves, by other people and by their own constrained natures, and now this wider existence trembled into view: an existence set free from fear, where they might be themselves and be happy; and they seized upon it with avidity. They almost never spoke of Elizabeth. Julie never did, and he but rarely. “My wife’s gone out with Mrs. Johnson. She’s crazy about the movies,” he sometimes said. Once he said, “I offered to go with her, but she said I wasn’t good enough company. She’d rather have anybody’s company but mine.” “Well, if she leaves him every night like that, of course he’s lonesome,” Julie thought sharply to herself.