"I've been moving too fast the last few days to have letters. I expect a lot to-morrow in Ohio." She spread the sheet on the table. "Here's the latest. Letty made the crosses." "Dere Mother I will be glad when you come home again because I do not like to sleep in Daddys and your room so well. Walter is coming to see me for a day and maybe I am going home with him we are being good I love You From your loving Son Spencer Hammond Good-by." "Nice kid." Bill looked up. "Let's see, he is just nine, isn't he?" "Going on ten." Catherine refolded the letter. She loved the little smudge from an inky thumb in the margin. "What shall we do now? You have several hours left." Bill set down his coffee cup. "Music? Theater? We can probably find seats for something." "I'd rather--" Catherine paused. "Is it too stormy for a walk? I never get out of doors any more. This morning, from a window in the building at the University, I had a glimpse of the lake. Could we go there? I'd like to see how much like the ocean it is." "It's windy, of course." "I'd like that." A picture of herself, buffeted by winds over a stretch of water--perhaps that would blow away the melancholy cobwebs, would whip her again into froth. Bill summoned a taxi, and in silence they rode through the long streets, south toward the park, their shoulders brushing as the machine bumped over frozen slush. Bill slumped forward, his hands linked about his knees, his shoulders an arc of weariness. The long streets seemed drawn past the windows of the cab, on either side a sliding strip of unfamiliar shapes. It's as if a spring had broken in him, thought Catherine, a secret spring which had kept him running. Perhaps Henrietta was right, and he is sick. "It's a long way, isn't it?" She had a plaintive moment of loneliness. Bill was the one familiar thing in the strange city, and he had retreated almost beyond communication. "I didn't know it was so far." "We're almost there." Bill straightened his shoulders, and peered out at the sliding street. "In the Fifties. I thought you'd like Jackson Park. More space there." A moment later he thrust open the door. "Here!" he called to the driver. "We'll get out here." II "There's your lake." Bill slipped his hand firmly under her arm, and they bent slightly forward into the dark rushing wind. At their feet a steady crunching, a restless churning as of china waves; beyond, a stretch of black hidden action under a sky black and infinitely remote, with sharp white stars. "This wind has broken up the shore ice." Along the sloping beach rose vague suggestions of grotesqueries; piles thrusting tortured heads with ice-hair above the frozen surface, driftwood caught between great blocks of dirty ice. "It's like Doré's Inferno." Catherine shivered. "You remember? That frozen hell, with awful heads sticking up in the ice?"