John Webster was standing facing his wife and daughter and his mind had gone back to the first night in bed with his wife and to the many other nights they had spent together. On that first night, long ago, when she lay talking to him, the moonlight came in through a window and fell on her face. She had been very beautiful at the moment. Now that he no longer approached her, afire with passion, but lay quietly beside her, with her body drawn a little away and with his arm about her shoulders, she was not afraid of him and occasionally put up her hand and touched his face. The truth was that he had got the notion into his head that there was in her a kind of spiritual power divorced altogether from the flesh. Outside the house, along the river banks, frogs were calling their throaty calls and once in the night some strange weird call came out of the air. That must have been some night bird, perhaps a loon. The sound wasn’t a call, really. It was a kind of wild laugh. From another part of the house, on the same floor there came the sound of her uncle’s snoring. The two people had slept little. There was so much to say. After all they were hardly acquainted. What he thought at the time was that she wasn’t a woman after all. She was a child. Something dreadful had happened to the child and he was to blame and now that she was his wife he would try hard to make everything all right. If passion frightened her he would subdue his passions. A thought had got into his head that had stayed there for years. It was that spiritual love was stronger and purer than physical love, that they were two different and distinct things. He had felt quite exalted when that notion came. He wondered now, as he stood looking down at the figure of his wife, what had happened that the notion at one time so strong in him, had not enabled him or her to get happiness together. One said the words and then, after all, they did not mean anything. They were trick words of the sort that were always fooling people, forcing people into false positions. He had come to hate such words. “Now I accept the flesh first, all flesh,” he thought vaguely, still looking down at her. He turned and stepped across the room to look in a glass. The flame of the candles made light enough so that he could see himself quite distinctly. It was a rather puzzling notion, but the truth was, that every time he had looked at his wife during the last few weeks he had wanted to run at once and look at himself in a glass. He had wanted to assure himself of something. The tall slender girl who had once lain beside him in a bed, with the moonlight falling on her face, had become the heavy inert woman now in the room with him, the woman who was at this moment crouched on the floor in the doorway at the foot of the bed. How much had he become like that?