Jane’s body continued to rock back and forth. The flesh of her body quivered too. Her body was rigid. Her fists were closed, tight, tight. Her fists continued to beat down upon her legs. Her mother had managed to get out through the bathroom door and across the little hallway to her own room. She had thrown herself face-downward on her bed in the darkness. Had she thrown herself down or had she fallen? Was she dying now, would she die presently or was she already dead? In the next room, in the room where Jane had seen her father walking naked before her mother and herself, the candles were still burning, under the picture of the Virgin. There was no doubt the older woman would die. In fancy Jane had seen the label on the bottle that contained the brown liquid. It was marked “Poison.” There was the picture of the skull and cross-bones druggists put on such bottles. And now Jane’s body had quit rocking. Perhaps her mother was dead. Now one tried to begin to think of other things. She became vaguely, but at the same time almost deliciously, conscious of some new element come into the air of the bedroom. There was a pain in the palm of her right hand. Something hurt her and the sense of hurting was refreshing. It brought life back. There was consciousness of self in the realization of bodily pain. One’s mind could start back along the road from some dark far place to which it had run crazily off. One’s mind could take hold of the thought of the little hurt place in the soft flesh of the palm of the hand. There was something there, something hard and sharp that cut into the flesh of the palm when one’s finger pressed down rigid and tense upon it. II In the palm of Jane Webster’s hand lay the small green stone her father had picked up on the railroad tracks and had given her at the moment of his departure. “The Jewel of Life,” he had called it in the moment when confusion had led him to give way to a desire to make some kind of gesture. A romantic notion had popped into his head. Had not men always used symbols to help carry them over the rough places in life? There was the Virgin with her candles. Was she not also a symbol? At some time, having decided in a moment of vanity that thought was of more importance than fancy, men had discarded the symbol. A Protestant kind of man arose who believed in a thing called “the age of reason.” There was a dreadful kind of egotism. Men could trust their own minds. As though they knew anything at all of the workings of their own minds. With a gesture and a smile John Webster had put the stone into his daughter’s hand and now she was clinging to it. One could press the finger down hard upon it and feel in the soft palm of the hand this delicious and healing pain.