She walked downtown in the young summer morning. The air had a coolness like lilacs after rain. A man passed. Coming closer, sheer, the sight of the man tugged on the cheek and on the neck of Fanny. A man old and bent. Grey beard tangled from a face long furrowed: the eyes were blue and gentle and the brow was untouched.... His beard was a grey prayer. His face was his life. Above his life was his brow like a dawn above storm. “He was a Jew,” she whispered to herself. Then she remembered her dreaming and her moan. * * * * * ... Something within her said: “There is no hurry.” Much within her said: “You have no life, you are broken. Why alive? You are broken and flayed by life. Life without what you have lost is a mere agony dying down, a slow starving, a slow suffocation.” But something within her said: “There is no hurry.” Something within her stirred to say: “Even your hurt has a soul. Even the insult lying in your heart has a soul.” Then her hands worked faster. She had eyes then for her girls toiling in their mute slavery, that brought out love, like a cool mist rising from a morning sun, into the dismal workroom. At times, eating her meat and enjoying it, laughing alone at a show, she found in herself assurance ... mad and blind howsoever ... like a babe’s lying within a womb. She asked herself doubtingly: “You have been unhappier having, than now when you are empty. Perhaps I am dead!” Each thought and pain, pushing forth from her, could not leave the mist of her strange slumber. So that she could not be unhappy. For unhappiness is the departure of ourselves from ourselves, the adventure beyond us of our hearts and eyes. Fanny was caught in her pregnant slumber. Her consciousness was like a maze of creatures crawling about a Sphere who cannot leave its surface: who cannot conceive of aught within or without its surface: creatures of two dimensions spanning a Globe about and about ... and yet unable to know it. * * * * * It had been hot, this day: now late, sultry clouds pressed like steel on the pulsant City. Dust rose in a great wind. The Office seemed to plunge through a sea of dust and steel cloud. The others were gone: in the suddenly dark room, Fanny worked alone with Mr. Johns. He examined her books, leaning over her, just above her shoulder, breathing palpably there in the dark room. A gust of wind from the gray window scattered a pile of papers, Johns’ hand came flat on the table. “It’s going to rain,” he said. “Yes.” He strode to the window and shut it. “That wont be too hot? All these papers will blow, I’m afraid.” “It’s cooler, already.” It was not cooler. The shut window made the dark room plunge and stifle. Fanny felt ill. Her hands ran over the sharp cool sheets of paper. The nerves of the palms of her hands were shrill. “Is that all, Mr. Johns?” “There’s the whole South yet! We’d better see how they’re drinking down in the South.” “O yes....”