--Saved me by them! I know that. You are all Lies about me, yet me who am true you have saved. Without you what could Clara’s naked love have done? Without you wouldn’t she be dead as I was? Your milk, your covers, your warmth ... lies: O my still bed, O sun that falls about the grey of my shoulders like a lawn of Spring upon an autumn earth--bless you, for there is quiet in you yet, and it has let me think. ... When I am at last all in thought, I am in the way of the end. To end is to be healed. I understand that. Life is a wound that only life can heal. --I might have died without beginning! You, lies, saved me. What does that mean? She lay back in her chair and the mirror fell to her lap.--I have lost so much hair ... black, lovely ... don’t think of that, that is not thinking! All you must fall as the hair fell. Fanny’s eyes closed. She slept. * * * * * She came to waking with her head forward and her hand upheld, watching her face in the glass. Clara was in the door. --Did my looking at her asleep ... how she has grown old!... make her raise the glass like that to her shut eyes? Then they opened. Clara was afraid of the displacement her thoughts might make: she moved in her room and sent out words in it as if the air were tight with some subtle, feeling substance easily overflowed. “How are you, dearie?... Been sleeping?” She laid a bunch of violets in Fanny’s lap. Fanny smiled, her eyes and her hands clasping the flowers thanked her. “I’m so much better. Where have you been?” “Just shopping.” Fanny had asked no such question before. Clara sensed beneath it the significant stir of her friend’s mind once more into the outer world. The outer world! What was going to be when Fanny once took note of her own world? She could not talk, for she was afraid. She drew a chair beside her in the sun, and held her hand and was still. “You are looking better. I have a broiler for you. _Now_ you must begin to _eat_.” Her stress stroked a wish: Fanny should eat long, must lose herself for a long time in eating. “I have been thinking,” Fanny said. “The sun’s so good, I’d like to walk in it.” “Dearie, it’s cold and raw out.” “I know it is.” “It’s only good in a warm room ... like this.” “I know.” Fanny’s hand clasped over Clara’s, silencing her. They sat in silence. With gazes long and almost parallel they thought of the sun that was good only in a warm room. “My room,” thought Clara. “Whose room?” thought Fanny.... “Clara tell me, ... you were not shopping. Why can’t you tell me where you were?” “Dear, when you’re well--“ “I am well now. A little weak, but well. Didn’t you say yourself--“ “I’ve been with him.” “You needn’t hide it. Don’t you think I know?” “Yes, Fan. But it’s all so untrue, since you are here.” “He must be good, never to come around.”