“If I come right down to it I suppose I’ve never done much thinking myself. Perhaps the whole business of life, here in this town and everywhere else, is just a kind of accidental affair. Things happen. People are swept along, eh? That’s the way it must be.” It was incomprehensible to him and his mind soon grew weary of trying to think further along that road. It went back to the matter of people and houses. Perhaps one could speak of that matter to Natalie. There was something simple and clear about her. “She has been working for me for three years now and it is strange I’ve never thought much about her before. She has a way of keeping things clear and straight. Everything has gone better since she has been with me.” It would be a thing to think about if all the time, since she had been with him, Natalie had understood the things that were just now becoming a little plain to him. Suppose, from the very beginning, she had been ready to have him go within herself. One could get quite romantic about the matter if one allowed oneself to think about it. There she would be, you see, that Natalie. She got out of bed in the morning and while she was there, in her own room, in the little frame house out at the edge of town, she said a little prayer. Then she walked along the streets and down along the railroad tracks to her work and to sit all day in the presence of a man. It was an interesting thought, just to suppose, as a kind of playful diversion let us say, that she, that Natalie, was pure and clean. In that case she wouldn’t be thinking much of herself. She loved, that is to say she had opened the doors of herself. One had a picture of her standing with the doors of her body open. Something constantly went out of her and into the man in whose presence she spent the day. He was unaware, was in fact too much absorbed in his own trivial affairs to be aware. Her own self also began to be absorbed with his affairs, to take the load of small and unimportant details of business off his mind in order that he in turn become aware of her, standing thus, with the doors of her body opened. How clean, sweet, and fragrant the house within which she lived! Before one went within such a house one would have to cleanse oneself too. That was clear. Natalie had done it with prayers and devotion, single-minded devotion to the interests of another. Could one cleanse one’s own house that way? Could one be as much the man as Natalie was the woman? It was a test. As for the matter of houses--if one got thinking of one’s own body in that way where would it all end? One might go further and think of one’s own body as a town, a city, as the world. It was a road to madness too. One might think of people constantly passing in and out of each other. In all the world there would be no more secrecy. Something like a great wind would sweep through the world. “A people drunk with life. A people drunk and joyous with life.”