When he had kindled a large fire of wood and coal, Siver would close the window and pour hot water from a pail into her pitcher on the wash-stand. He was nothing to her, Siver, but serving hands. He was but serving hands, unsensed, unrealized. He was a command given and accomplished. If he became momentarily real he was intently loathed and quickly transferred to serving hands again. The sound of the flowing water and the crockery would be as distinct and as meaningless as the other sounds of the morning, flat against the coming tide of the new day, unreal before her speculations about the dress or the fiddle-practice. Siver gone and the closed door having settled an hour of stillness upon the room, the earth would grow into the volume and substance of dream and lie finished and accomplished, apart and done. * * * * * The farmers were discontented with the tobacco sales. The speculators were busy passing the crop from hand to hand, playing a game to outdo one another. Sometimes a farmer saw his crop selling for twice the sum he had been paid less than a week earlier. “Too many dead-heads function between the grower and the manufacturer,” Albert said. The tobacco wagons, piled high, were lined in every open space about the warehouses. A heavy odor of crude tobacco hung in the damp air. At Catherine Lovell’s home there was a large double parlor with a hard smooth floor. Often the rugs were rolled up for dancing, and then two negroes sat in the hallway making the music, _I Don’t Know Why I Feel So Shy_, or _Dixie Dan_, the rhythms brought down from Hill Street. Albert talked about the new association for the growers as he waited between the dances, sitting along the wall of the dining-room on the red divan. The men would have to combine, he said. The market was all in a wreck. There would have to be such a pool as was never formed before, something solid. He spent his days now going about among the farmers, pledging them to the new measure, talking of it to hostile growers. He carried memoranda in his pocket snapped importantly together under a rubber band. The throb of the dance rhythms would wail from the outer hall. Somebody had given the players a smart drink and they set the true rhythms of Hill Street under the dancers’ feet, rhythms richly ripened with use. Theodosia and Conway trampled the rhythms under their light tread. I likes a little loven now and then, When the loven one is you.... What was a rhythm more or less? their feet asked the smooth floor. “What’s this thing we’re a-dancen to?” Conway asked her. “Is it a two-step or a waltz or a barn dance, or what is it anyway?” “Don’t you know really, on your honor?” “I just get up and do what the music makes me. I never know what kind ’tis.”