With the exception of the springing flame in her gaze, she did not move. She was arrested in any ordinary motion by the violence of her purpose. “I am not going to have that baby!” She reported to me: “I saw straight into his mind. It’s easy to see into a man’s mind when you’ve been married to him.” He was conscious of his face. He had felt the muscles drawing tightly--drawn back to his ears, drawn around his nose--drawing his mouth into a new and strange mouth. In his mind that Eva so easily read there was a crash, as if a house that he had built had fallen. She again spoke to him. “You might as well understand, first as last, that I have no intention of going through with it.” She said she began walking up and down the room. “I have my work to do. I have my career to consider. Let other women have children.” And again she was very sure that she saw into his head, and she was not moved by what she saw. He looked at her with impersonal wonder; for this much he had discovered--that she was ugly. But he realized that he must say something. Eva reminded me that she had told me, upon another occasion when she had reported one of their scenes, that when he was exalted he was not under a compulsion to speak. He said, at any rate: “You would do this--you?” She said to me: “If you keep your head, and watch--and you are a novelist--life is dramatic: isn’t it?” What she said to him was: “You are being melodramatic.” PART FOUR [Illustration] I There was about the whole thing a sense of swift disaster. Ruin of all things, temporal and spiritual, seemed close on our heels. And yet, nothing had actually happened to us. But the air was charged with vengeance. One found oneself believing implicitly in the Old Testament, and in a God who was mighty in wrath. In words, on white paper, I am failing to convey the full weight of this threat as we received it at the time. Things are never so bad, once they are translated into words; for words fail of true imputation. If I had seen on the sky, as upon my return to New York I had almost expected to see, a finger tracing a curse, I would not have been shakier than I was when, in the chilly afternoon sunshine, I came from the little house in Eleventh Street with Eva. This disappointing sunshine glinted across the stoop and neglected the north windows and warmed nothing. We were going out for a walk. Eva’s face, above her furs, flower-like in its delicacy of feature and colouring, was so much more heartening than the things of which I had been thinking that I smiled at her. “You are nice, Eva,” I said; “you’re nice!”