“What I am thinking is merely that such things happen. I am talking of another time and place, you see. On that other evening, as I sat in the hotel writing-room, there was just such another light, and across the street a girl, or a woman, was coming down a stairway. I had the illusion that she was nude like a young birch tree and that she was coming toward me. Her face made a grayish wavering shadow-like spot in the hallway and she was evidently waiting for some one as she kept thrusting her head out and looking up and down the street. “I became a fool again. That’s the story, I dare say. As I sat looking and leaning forward, trying to see deeper and deeper into the evening light, a man came hurrying along the street and stopped at the stairway. He was tall like herself and when he stopped I remember that he took off his hat and stepped into the darkness holding it in his hand. There was probably something stealthy and covered-up about the love affair between the two people as the man also put his head out of the stairway and looked long and carefully up and down the street before taking the woman into his arms. Perhaps she was some other man’s wife. Anyway they stepped back a little into a greater darkness and, I thought, took each other quite completely. How much I saw and how much I imagined I’ll of course never know. At any rate the two grayish white faces seemed to float and then merge and become one grayish white spot. “A violent tremor ran through my body. There, it seemed to me, but a few hundred feet from where I sat, now almost in complete darkness, was love finding glorious expression. Lips clung to lips, two warm bodies pressed close to each other, something altogether glorious and lovely in life, that I, by running about in the evening with the poor little girls of the town, and by trying to induce them to go with me into the fields to serve only my animal hunger--well, you see, there was a thing one might find in life that I had not found and that at the moment I thought I had failed to find because, at a great crisis, I had not found courage to go persistently toward it.” IV “And so you see I lighted a lamp in the writing-room of that hotel and forgot my supper and sat there and wrote pages and pages to the woman, and grew foolish too and confessed a lie, that I was ashamed of the thing that had happened between us some months before, and that I had only done it, that is to say, that I had only run into the room to her that second time, because I was a fool and a lot of other unspeakable nonsense.”