The spirit of death was no doubt lurking in the Webster house. Jane Webster felt its presence. She had suddenly been made aware of the possibility of feeling, within herself, many unspoken, unannounced things. When her father had put his hand on her arm and had pushed her back into the darkness behind the closed door of her own room, she had gone directly to her bed and had thrown herself down on top of the bed covers. Now she lay clutching the little stone he had given her. How glad she was to have that something to clutch. Her fingers pressed against it so that it had already become imbedded in the flesh of her palm. If her life had been, until this evening, a quiet river, running down through fields toward the sea of life, it would be that no more. Now the river had come into a dark stony country. It ran now along rocky passageways, between high dark cliffs. What things might not now happen to her on the morrow, on the day after to-morrow. Her father was going away with a strange woman. There would be a scandal in the town. All her young women and men friends would look at her with a question in their eyes. Perhaps they would pity her. Her spirit rose up and the thought made her squirm with anger. It was odd, but it was nevertheless true, that she had no particular feeling of sympathy for her mother. Her father had managed to bring himself close to her. In a queer way she understood what he was going to do, why he was doing it. She kept seeing the naked figure of the man striding up and down before her. There had always, since she could remember, been in her a kind of curiosity regarding men’s bodies. Once or twice, with young girls she knew well, there had been talk of the matter, guarded, half-frightened talk. “A man was so and so. It was quite dreadful what happened when one grew up and got married.” One of the girls had seen something. There was a man lived near her, on the same street, and he wasn’t always careful about pulling the shade to his bedroom window. One summer afternoon the girl was in her room, lying on her bed, and the man came into his room and took off all his clothes. He was up to some foolishness. There was a looking glass and he pranced up and down before it. He must have been pretending he was fighting the man he saw reflected in the glass as he kept advancing and receding and making the funniest movements with his body and arms. He lunged and scowled and struck out with his fists and then jumped back, as though the man in the glass had struck at him.