“At any other time what Natalie had done might have passed unnoticed,” he told himself later, but that fact did not in any way destroy its significance. All of the women who worked in his office as well as the bookkeeper and the men in the factory were in the habit of carrying their lunches and Natalie had brought her lunch on that morning as always. He remembered having seen her come in with it wrapped in a paper package. Her home was a long distance away, at the edge of the town. None of the other of his employees came from so great a distance. And on that noon she had not eaten her lunch. There it was done up in its package and lying on a shelf back of her head. What had happened was this--at the noon time she had hurried out of the office and had run all the way home to her mother’s house. There was no bathtub there, but she had drawn water from a well and put it in a common washtub in a shed back of the house. Then she had plunged into the water and washed her body from head to foot. After she had done that she had gone upstairs and arrayed herself in a special dress, the best one she owned, the one she had always kept for Sunday afternoons and for special occasions. As she dressed, her old mother, who had been following her about, swearing at her and demanding an explanation, stood at the foot of the stairway leading to her room and called her vile names. “You little whore, you are planning to go out with some man to-night so you are fixing yourself up as though you were about to be married. A swell chance either of my two daughters have got to ever get themselves husbands. If you’ve got any money in your pocket you give it to me. I wouldn’t care so much about your traipsing around if you ever got any money,” she declared in a loud voice. On the evening before she had got money from one of the daughters and during the morning had provided herself with a bottle of whiskey. Now she was enjoying herself. Natalie had paid no attention to her. When she was fully dressed she hurried down the stairs, brushing the old woman aside, and half ran back to the factory. The other women employed there had laughed when they saw her coming. “What’s Natalie up to?” they had asked each other. John Webster stood looking at her and thinking. He knew all about what she had done and why she had done it although he had seen nothing. Now she did not look at him, but, turning her head slightly, looked out over the lumber piles. Well then she had known all day what had been going on within himself. She had understood his sudden desire to come within herself so she had run home to bathe and array herself. “It was like washing the door sills of her house and hanging newly laundered curtains at the windows,” he thought whimsically.