“He knows all about you ... and he won’t come--until I tell him it’s alright. He _has_ been good. He has left me alone. Well--he knows if he didn’t--“ “Tell him to come,” said Fanny. Clara jumped up. She was afraid and uncertain. She knew not why she was so. “I must see about dinner.” She tossed off her hat and was gone. * * * * * It was a little flat. The dining room, the living room, the bed room, were compact and warm in dull brown, rose, blue. They were retiscent rooms, stiff proper little places furnished as with sedate conventions. Naught of vice, naught of abandon about them: they had no strength but they were full of ease. Like married old ladies, they were at rest on something very sure. Fanny did not understand them. But in her fever she had taken and used them as a babe its nurse. Fanny and Clara ate, almost in silence. Fanny’s half chicken ... she made her friend take the other half ... was a luscious problem. She must eat it fast ... before it got cold or spoiled ... it held her like a spell in its succulent evanescent glow. It lay in the white plate the color of sunstone. “Since I have been here,” she said, “no one has come to your place. No one. You’ve broken up your whole life because of me. Dear Clara ... that’s a hard thing for me to know.” “I’ve had no time for my friends. I’ve had too anxious, too wonderful a time, nursing you, Dear.” “I was very sick?” Fanny smiled. “When I looked in the glass today I knew that. I’m an old woman, Clara.” The girl shook her head. “Don’t talk that way!” Her eyes were full on Fanny with a joy that was not denial. She did not mind. “You are not old,” she said. “But you’re mature ... somehow I suppose, next to all us, you must seem old to yourself. You are ripe, Fanny. You are glorious.” Her face glowed with the hard repressiveness against her feeling which was her only show of feeling. “Come, now ... to bed.” She helped her to undress, diffident but sure: the gestures of a nurse swathed in a mist of sentiment of a bridegroom. She smoothed the covers: she placed a hand on Fanny’s brow pressing her head within the pillow, folding the soft quilt at her chin. She did not kiss her other than so, with her hands. But once, in those gigantic days of the shadow of the Church, of the shadow of what else that had come and was to come! had Clara’s lips touched Fanny. * * * * * Fanny lay in Clara’s bed ... for a month Clara had slept beside her in a cot. And Clara, by the low table lamp that drooped above her shoulder shedding a bloom upon her neck, read aloud a story....