--I have been in this room before, I have seen this woman before. It is not the sort of room, she is not the sort of woman I want to see for I am here for neither.... Why strangely now this sense of her reality upon me? It was her room, there they were after all, the woman in her room touching upon him.--Let me see in this silence the woman in her room. Her quiet words did not obtrude upon a silence whose margin he caught as it waved. He saw her a battered creature. He saw her absurdity of painted cheeks, two imitation flowers stuck in the ruts of a road. He sat in a room whose dinginess enarmed him. He sat in the misery of this woman. He sat deep. “Still so cold out?” Over her head a chandelier ... brass gas, hideous brutal under the flecked ceiling. His feet glowed with renewing warmth. In his eye beneath his shoes a carpet of acid green. --We sit.... She sits in a cloud of dinginess. Sharp spirit veiled in a cloudy flesh. Now: centers of glow, thrown from the woman, solid like her spirit. He was aware of loveliness. Under the blow of the chandelier a delicate Pembroke table ... book and a glass of whisky. --Under my arms, pressing against my back, a high arched Windsor chair. In the break of her hip, standing, a Hepple--white desk. --We have no furniture like this at home! She spoke. He peered into the form of her words. His eyes took the gloss of the subtle table, it was one with her words’ accent. Futile words ... grammatical, well-ordered. A subtle table, and beyond a virulent huge sideboard. A faint quaint accent in her pointless words curling like heat of hidden flame above the table, against the sideboard: whispers in how she spoke, like these glowing poems in wood, of a day distant from his New York where there had been leisure and when from the dung of human misery America grew flowers. A quiet pain in the table and her words ... a distant pain. He did not put his immediate question. She felt his pause; in it drew up her chair. She sat he thought with grace athwart him at the table. The whisky glass was gone, he had not noticed her hide it. The book was there with her hand. Black little book. _Bible!_ He felt her feeling him feel her. Now she was silent. They were silent upon each other. Heavily. His brow twitched.--Let me see her! She was cold and helpless. He understood he could not understand. She seemed a chaste woman with burnt eyes. She drew him. Words to pull him aloof: “I am afraid we don’t read that book ... half enough.... I don’t I mean,” he blushed. “Do we, Mrs. Luve?” --Wrong. Wrong! A delicate line left ... he felt _left_ ... under her folded thin lip. Lip folded away. “It’s a rattling good book.” “O but _you_ do.” “I?” “_You_ read it enough.... You’re a Jew.”