“Heugh!” Pentreath grunted, and made off down the room. I scrambled from the chair. With elaborate carelessness I lit a cigarette; and I noticed, with impersonal interest, that my hand shook. He had, then, frightened me. I hurried to tell Florence, who had come from the bedroom, also carelessly smoking, that he had made me see that bad as existence was I liked it. “He knocked into a cocked hat all that Yoga stuff you forever tease me about. I wonder what would be happening to me now, if he’d come down with that beer bottle?” And she speculated, but indifferently, on whether I was unstrung because of the beer bottle being capable of causing pain, or because of the tottering of my belief. Eva came up to us with a reproach. “Why didn’t one of you make me go home? I have a feeling of something menacing. I can’t understand what is going on. Tony Bloodgood is looking queer, and hunting for Nick: and where--I want to know--is Nick? Oh, Dinah--you always take up for him; but even you must acknowledge that he shouldn’t go off and leave me to face this sort of thing alone! Some people may be able to bear this sort of thing; but if you realized how things affect me----” She went on about artists being extraordinarily sensitive to impressions. Florence asked if she did not think we had to hear a lot of that; and turned on her heel and left us. Enviously I gazed after her: I never acted on my impulses, and they died quickly. With a sigh, I suggested that we go down to the sidewalk and get some air. On the steep and winding stairway another fugitive rushed past us and flung open the street door. We reached the sidewalk as the girl Janny was being handed into a cruising taxi by the night watchman on the block. The watchman treated us to a leer. “Lor!” he remarked affably. “I’m used ter ladies bustin’ outer that there house! I knows, when I sees ’em atearin’ for the street, I better git ’em a taxi in a jiffy.” We stayed out long enough for a cigarette. I think that we were both reluctant to reënter the house. The watchman hung around, senilely communicative. “It pays ter be a watchman, on some blocks of this here town. You know this town well, ladies?” The walls of the winding stairway were painted with beasts and birds unnaturally entangled amid unnatural forests. With every step that we mounted we became more apprehensive. But Eva said: “We’re being foolish; aren’t we? There’s no bogy lying in wait for us. But I’ll own up, Dinah, that there are times, of late, when I feel afraid in the dark. It must be this damnable depression you forever talk about. I feel---- Well, I don’t feel natural.”