She had a room which she had come to love. It was upstairs in the back of an old red brick house: it was oblong, square-buttressed by its honest doors painted white, its two wide windows and its low grey ceiling. She had spent eight dollars to remove the acid-red carnations blotching a sea of green bars on the walls ... (“I want you to scrape first, not paper over it”) ... then clad her room in a dull buff. The walls were bare. The landlady grumblingly took out the wide iron bed, leaving her a couch. The carved oak table, the bastard Empire chairs were distributed to the rest of the lodgers and replaced by plain ones from the storeroom. She took off her hat, let down her hair, put slippers on her feet and drew a chair to the wind. The day was more darkly textured but still clear. An ailanthus flaunting half naked through its tinselly leaves thrust above fence and tesselate brick walls between her and the grey rear of a Church. Beside the Church, a small house receded, built of the same dim sooty stone. On Sundays, the sun vaulted the cluttered roofs at just about the time that a hymn, many-voiced, shone through the corner of the stained-glass window which she could glimpse on the protruding side. There was a little grass plot. It was littered with dust and ash bits, fluffs of drifting textile: but now sod pushed bravely up in a dim green. On the high fence at the side away from the Church, among clusters like sunrays of iron spikes, clothes-lines were drawn. A servant was busy taking in the wash. The girl’s arms reached up, loosed clothes-pins, dropped her armsfull in a basket. The girl’s arms reached up.... Fanny lost herself in the dull catatony. She was tired. She held her eyes beyond her. Dimly behind she felt a world she did not wish to turn to: world where there were wash-lines and a girl her own.... Industrious, this girl. A young man stepped from the kitchen door of the house. The girl’s arms, full of tableclothes, suspended against her breast. He spoke to her, she nodded: disposed her burden. She was bent before him, he leaned down and kissed her. He stepped back, his arms and hands and shoulders, his feet and hips throwing out little splintery signals of his panic. He wore the cloth of the Church. Then the girl straightened, lifted her hands to her broad hips and smiled. The little curate’s splintering commotion melted. He kissed her again. They went together into the kitchen. Fanny sat very still. She felt that the muscles of her throat and legs and chest were tense, holding her still. --What is the matter? The world dim behind her eyes bellied out ... swallowed the cool grey scene before her of a backyard, a flirting servant and a Church. A Church! Fanny swung around in her chair. She was circled now by a world no longer dim. She asked no question. Like one dropped sudden into a sea, she swam.