He felt very like laughing at himself. As a matter of fact he knew little of Natalie or what she might be thinking or feeling at such a time. Had he only taken up with her because she was a kind of instrument that would help him escape from his wife and from a life he had come to detest? Was he but using her? Had he at bottom any real feeling in regard to her, any understanding of her? He wondered. One made a mighty big fuss, fixed up a room with candles and a picture of the Virgin, paraded oneself naked before women, got oneself little glass candle sticks with bronze-colored Christs on the Cross on them. One made a great fuss, pretended one was upsetting the whole world, in order to do something that a man of real courage would have gone at in a direct simple way. Another man might have done everything he had done with a laugh and a gesture. What was all this business he was up to anyway? He was going away, he was deliberately walking out of his native town, walking out of a town in which he had been a respectable citizen for years, all his life in fact. He was going out of the town with a woman, younger than himself, who had taken his fancy. The whole thing was a matter that could be easily enough understood, by anyone, by any man one might happen to meet in the street. At any rate every one would be quite sure he understood. There would be eyebrows raised, shoulder shrugging. Men would stand together in little groups and talk and women would run from house to house talking, talking. O, the merry little shoulder shruggers! O, the merry little talkers! Where did a man come out in all this? What, in the end, did he think of himself? There was Natalie, walking along, in the half darkness. She breathed. She was a woman with a body, with arms, legs. She had a trunk to her body and perched upon her neck was a head within which there was a brain. She thought thoughts. She had dreams. Natalie was walking along a street in the darkness. Her footsteps were ringing out sharp and clear as she stepped along, on the sidewalk. What did he know of Natalie? It might well be that, when he and Natalie really knew each other, when they had together faced the problem of living together--Well, it might be that it wouldn’t work at all. John Webster was walking along the street, in the darkness, on the strip of grass, that in Middle Western towns is between the sidewalk and the roadway. He stumbled and came near falling. What was the matter with him? Was he growing tired again? Did doubts come because he was growing tired? It might well be that everything that had happened to him, during the night, had happened because he was caught up and carried along by a kind of temporary insanity. What would happen when the insanity had passed, when he became again a sane, a well, a normal man?