"Yes. It does that for me, too." Catherine smiled at him in a flicker of mockery. She caught a faint slackening of his fingers. Stella Partridge! But she knew, even in the impulse to have that out, to insist upon it as part of the winter, that it was better left untouched. Intangible, incomplete, a kind of subtle aberration, it would dissolve more quickly unexpressed. "I'd be a beast to say I wouldn't go. A perverted, selfish wife. Wouldn't I? I can't be that. I'm too soft. Charles, I do desire for you every chance----" "You're not soft. You're really fine. You----" He jumped to his feet. "And when we get out there, you'll see. You'll like it! Lots of things for you to do. You will be happy, Cathy. I'll make you happy." Catherine, leaning back in her chair, lifted her face to look up at him. She heard in his voice the shouting down of fear; he had been worried, then. He had not been sure. XIII Catherine sat on the window sill, looking down at the shadows which slanted across the tree tops of Morningside. In the distance roofs still glittered in the afternoon sunlight. Beneath her the spring leaves were delicate and small, keeping their own fine shape, not yet making green masses. A little easterly breeze touched her warm cheek, and she thought, leaning from the window, that she sniffed in it the faint piquancy of Balm of Gilead buds. The last trunk was banging down the hall, its thuds like muttered profanities. She turned back to the dismantled rooms. How queer they looked, small, dingy, worn. Mrs. O'Lay, in the kitchen, was assuring Charles: "Sure and you needn't worry yourself about that, Mr. Hammond. I'll clear out every stick. Them little things I've saved for myself. I can make use of them." She was cramming things into the dumbwaiter. Catherine could hear the rustling of waste paper. Catherine stood up, cautiously. She was stiff, almost dizzy, as if she had bent so long over packing boxes and trunks that her head couldn't without penalty be held upright. Well, it was done. Incredible and astonishing, that the disorder and confusion had come to an end. "All ready, dear?" Charles stood in the doorway, buttoning his coat, patting his tie into place. "About time we got off." "Be sure there is nothing left." Catherine went slowly through the rooms, listening to the walls return her footsteps emptily. In the kitchen Mrs. O'Lay poked among the salvage, bundles, piles, an old black hat of Catherine's mounted rakishly on a box of breakfast food, a dingy cotton duck of Letty's, limp from loss of stuffing. "I'll finish up here, Mis' Hammond." The broad red face was creased into downward wrinkles. "Sure, an' I hate to see the end of you," she said. "It's fine for you you got a tenant to come in right away, but we'll miss you." "Taxi, Catherine!" shouted Charles. "Good-by, God love you!" Mrs. O'Lay waved her out of the apartment onto the elevator.