He wished it were possible for him to speak to Natalie, to ask her to walk on the grass and not to awaken the people sleeping in the houses. “Well, I’m going to do it,” he thought. It was odd how much courage it took now just to speak to her. Neither of them had spoken since they had set out together on this adventure. He stopped and stood for a moment and Natalie, realizing that he was no longer walking beside her, also stopped. “What is it? What’s the matter, John?” she asked. It was the first time she had addressed him by that name. It made everything easier, her having done that. Still his throat was a little tight. It couldn’t be that he also wanted to weep. What nonsense. There was no need accepting defeat with Natalie until defeat came. There were two sides to this matter of his passing judgment on what he had done. To be sure there was a chance, a possibility, that he had made all this row, upset all his past life, made a mess of things for his wife and daughter, and for Natalie too, to no purpose, merely because he had wanted to escape the boredom of his past existence. He stood on the strip of grass at the edge of a lawn before a silent respectable house, some one’s home. He was trying to see Natalie clearly, trying to see himself clearly. What kind of a figure was he cutting? The light was not very clear. Natalie was but a dark mass before him. His own thoughts were but a dark mass before him. “Am I just a lustful man wanting a new woman?” he asked himself. Suppose that were true. What did it mean? “I am myself. I am trying to be myself,” he told himself stoutly. One should try to live outside oneself too, to live in others. Had he tried to live in Natalie? He had gone within Natalie. Had he gone within her because there was something within her he had wanted and needed, something he loved? There was something within Natalie that had set fire to something within himself. It was that ability in her to set him afire he had wanted, still wanted. She had done that for him, was still doing it for him. When he could no longer respond to her he could perhaps find other loves. She could do that too. He laughed softly. There was a kind of gladness in him now. He had made of himself, and of Natalie too, what is called disreputable characters. Back into his fancy came a troop of figures, all in their own ways disreputable characters. There was the white-haired old man he had once seen walking with a certain air of being proud and glad of the road, an actress he had seen coming out at the stage entrance of a theatre, a sailor who had thrown his bag aboard a ship and had walked off along a street with a certain air of being proud and glad of the life within himself. There were such fellows in the world.