It was the woman of the house, the German’s wife. What was up? Was she also trying dumbly to draw nearer something that was like herself, that she could understand, a little? Thoughts flitted through Tom’s head and a dumb kind of desire arose within him. He began hoping vaguely that the woman was in search of himself. Later, when he told me of the happenings of that night, he was quite sure that the feeling that then possessed him was not physical desire for a woman. His own mother had died several years before and the woman his father had later married had seemed to him just a thing about the house, a not very competent thing, bones, a hank of hair, a body that did not do very well what one’s body was supposed to do. “I was intolerant as the devil, about all women. Maybe I always have been but then—I’m sure I was a queer kind of country bumpkin aristocrat. I thought myself something, a special thing in the world, and that woman, any women I had ever seen or known, the wives of a few neighbors as poor as my father, a few country girls—I had thought them all beneath my contempt, dirt under my feet. “About that German’s wife I had not felt that way. I don’t know why. Perhaps because she had a habit of keeping her mouth shut as I did just at that time, a habit I have since lost.” And so Tom stood there—waiting. The woman came slowly along the fence, keeping in the shadow of the bushes and then crossed an open space toward the barn. Now she was walking slowly along the barn wall, directly toward the young man who stood in the heavy shadows holding his breath and waiting for her coming. Afterwards, when he thought of what had happened, he could never quite make up his mind whether she was walking in sleep or was awake as she came slowly toward him. They did not speak the same language and they never saw each other after that night. Perhaps she had only been restless and had got out of the bed beside her husband and made her way out of the house, without any conscious knowledge of what she was doing. She became conscious when she came to where he was standing however, conscious and frightened. He stepped out toward her and she stopped. Their faces were very close together and her eyes were large with alarm. “The pupils dilated,” he said in speaking of that moment. He insisted upon the eyes. “There was a fluttering something in them. I am sure I do not exaggerate when I say that at the moment I saw everything as clearly as though we had been standing together in the broad daylight. Perhaps something had happened to my own eyes, eh? That might be possible. I could not speak to her, reassure her—I could not say, ‘Do not be frightened, woman.’ I couldn’t say anything. My eyes I suppose had to do all the saying.”