Her hands on the fiddle were weak and apathetic, startled into numbness. She put the instrument aside, shut it tenderly away into its case and sat staring at the flames or she moved suddenly to some new posture. She felt as if she were alone with her grandfather in this; Conway had been shut away as tenderly as had been the fiddle; Albert was avoided as pertaining somehow too nearly to the facts. She read the letters again, eating their words, leaping ahead to the telling phrases. “This is the last of your share from your mother’s estate. Make it go as far as it will. You knew when you married Horace Bell that he was the father of two blacks.... I will come whenever I can, or your brother will manage to go by Anneville on his way back from the meet.... You better turn your attention to something else. Take up church work.... Dropped his litter in the alley behind the jail. The half-wit, Dolly Brown, for God’s sake! Old Josie’s girl was a handsome wench, but slobbering Dolly Brown.... A strange taste in wenches.” She gathered the letters together and dropped them into the fire in a fury of anger, but when they had turned to feathery cinders she wondered at her act and repented of it. Persons had grown out of the search, a man vaguely outlined in youth, Anthony Bell, or her mother, Charlotte, others. Her infantile concept of her father as one playful, merry, light-hearted, child-like, made a confused war with later concepts of him as a jumble of demands upon affection and forbearance. She remembered her mother as a large passionate woman who hated her broken life, but in turn she remembered little Annie, born after the incident behind the jail, five years after. She was benumbed before the new knowledge and shared only with Anthony. Her outer vision dulled by the fire and by weariness, her inner vision heightened, and she began to divide her being, searching for some soul or spirit. Her search took her into her grandfather’s being where it touched accurately to her own. He was old, withered, palsied, but he had life, a life, from first to last, she observed, and the house was real for him and the people of the house, the pain of his sickness. Her search took her into many of the ways of men. When a man is a baby someone uncovers his nakedness and bathes it. Then he has a long season of being obscure, withdrawn within himself, alive, secret with life. Finally he is old and again someone must uncover his nakedness and bathe him, handle him as if he were new-born. She herself had done this for him. Where, she questioned, is his soul?