Now he was not in the least weary. “I’m sure I must be a little insane. A sane person would not note every little thing that goes on as I do to-day,” he thought. He sang softly, wanting to hear his own voice, to in a way test it against the voices of his wife and daughter. He hummed over the words of a negro song that had been in his mind earlier in the day, “And before I’d be a slave, I’d be buried in my grave, And go home to my father and be saved.” He thought his own voice all right. The words came out of his throat clearly and there was a kind of resonance too. “Had I tried to sing yesterday it would not have sounded like that,” he concluded. The voices of his mind were playing about busily. There was a kind of gaiety in him. The thought that had come that morning when he looked into the eyes of Natalie Swartz came running back. His own body, that was now naked, was a house. He went and stood before a mirror and looked at himself. His body was still slender and healthy looking, outside. “I think I know what all this business is I am going through,” he concluded. “A kind of house cleaning is going on. My house has been vacant now for twenty years. Dust has settled on the walls and furniture. Now, for some reason I do not understand, the doors and windows have been thrown open. I shall have to scrub the walls and the floors, make everything sweet and clean as it is in Natalie’s house. Then I shall invite people in to visit me.” He ran his hands over his naked body, over his breasts, arms, and legs. Something within him was laughing. He went and threw himself, thus naked on the bed. There were four sleeping rooms in the upper floor of the house. His own was at a corner and there were doors opening into his wife’s and his daughter’s rooms. When he had first married his wife they had slept together, but when the baby came they gave that up and never did it afterward. Once in a long while now he went in to his wife at night. She wanted him, let him know in some woman’s way that she wanted him, and he went, not happily or eagerly, but because he was a man and she a woman and it was done. The thought wearied him a little. “Well it hasn’t happened for some weeks.” He did not want to think about it.