There was a story of a marriage he had not finished, would never finish telling now, but in time his daughter would come to understand what the end of the story must inevitably be. There was something that should be thought of now. His daughter was going out of his presence. Perhaps he would never see her again. One continually dramatized life, made a play of it. That was inevitable. Every day of one’s life consisted of a series of little dramas and one was always casting oneself for an important part in the performance. It was annoying to forget one’s lines, not to walk out upon the stage when one had got one’s cue. Nero fiddled when Rome was burning. He had forgotten what part he had assigned to himself and so fiddled in order not to give himself away. Perhaps he had intended making an ordinary politician’s speech about a city rising again from the flames. Blood of the saints! Would his daughter walk calmly out of the room without turning at the door? What had he yet intended saying to her? He was growing a little nervous and upset. * * * * * His daughter was standing in the doorway leading to her own room, looking at him, and there was a kind of intense half-insane mood in her as all evening there had been in him. He had infected her with something out of himself. After all there had been what he had wanted, a real marriage. After this evening the younger woman could never be what she might have been, had this evening not happened. Now he knew what he wanted for her. Those men, whose figures had just visited his fancy, the race-track man, the old man in the road, the sailor on the docks, there was a thing they had got hold of he had wanted her to have hold of too. Now he was going away with Natalie, with his own woman, and he would not see his daughter again. She was a young girl yet, really. All of womanhood lay before her. “I’m damned. I’m crazy as a loon,” he thought. He had suddenly a ridiculous desire to begin singing a silly refrain that had just come into his head. Diddle de di do, Diddle de di do, Chinaberries grow on a Chinaberry tree. Diddle de di do. And then his fingers, fumbling about in his pockets, came upon the thing he had unconsciously been looking for. He clutched it, half convulsively, and went toward his daughter, holding it between his thumb and finger. * * * * * On the afternoon of the day, on which he had first found his way in at the door of Natalie’s house, and when he had become almost distracted from much thinking, he had found a bright little stone on the railroad track near his factory.