I had two rooms--a bedroom and parlor. Sleep and reading in bed were thus kept separate from work, from the two hundred and eighteen pages of my serial which had to be cut sheet by sheet, line by line, to fit the precise requirements of a weekly magazine. This small suite was on the sixteenth floor. Here, the street sounds became boogie-woogie--set to rhythm by bouncing back and forth between the walls of Madison Avenue. Here the smell of the city was less toxic. And here the eye ranged over rooftops. My draperies, flowered and lined with sateen, moved now against the dark-green embrasures of the window--not in a breeze but in the upward eddy of diurnal heat. The yellow roses with which the management had greeted me dangled in their vase. I wondered whether to cut their stems or throw them out. If Ricky, my wife, had accompanied me, there would have been two dozen roses--and she would have known about the stems. I propped open the door to the hall with a book. Air sucked through the crack. In a big mirror, over the mantel, over the chunks of topaz glass that represented coals in the artificial fireplace, I could see myself. Strained and pallid, sweat showing at the armpits of my dark-blue gabardine jacket. I took it off. My shirt was wet. I took that off. The man in the mirror was naked from the waist up. A man with a little fold of belly showing over his belt. A man whose back, when he turned, was well muscled at the shoulders and ridged with parallel sinews that made a valley of the spine. A man whose strength had come through effort and application, rather late. A man who stepped closer to the mirror and opened his mouth to study, inside it, a small, fresh wound. He sat down on the divan, presently, and took a cigarette from the coffee table. Lighted it. Reached for the telephone. And identified with himself again. I wanted to call Ricky--in the country. To call her from the vegetable garden, where she might be weeding, or from the rock garden, when she might be replanting the daffodil bulbs, to call her from a book, or from washing the cocker pups, or from painting shelves, or from anything that she was doing. I wanted, with overwhelming urgency to tell her to come down to New York and share this weekend. Carry it with me and for me. She would. She has the grit and the amenability to Nature. Besides, she knows me. But I sat there, my fingers growing slippery on the phone. If it proved to be harmless--then the consummate hours, the pain, the anxiety, and the quiet planning would be a mere excess. If it proved malignant--what purpose would be served by destroying her tranquillity, by adding her dread to my own, until the hour when the fact was established? She would willingly, wantingly, accept the burden--to ease my share of it. But why should she?