Jim wavered, then resisted temptation. His record in that particular respect had been almost absolutely clean. He walked home stiffly, fighting with the skill of the practiced alcoholic for the upright position and the shortest distance between two points. His early morbidity had vanished. If he had done one thing badly that evening, he had done another thing well. Whatever his wife, Georgia, might urge against him in regard to his conviviality, wasn't he, after all, one of the most faithful husbands he knew? For all her superior airs, she had much to be grateful for in him. He entered his flat with little scraping of the keyhole, and cautiously undressed in the front room. It was late--much later than he had hoped for. He could just make out the hands of the clock on the mantelpiece by the light from the street lamp. He opened the door to their bedroom so slowly, so slowly and steadily, and then--as usual, that cursed hinge betrayed him. The number of times he had determined to oil it--yet he always forgot to. To-morrow he wouldn't forget--that was his flaming purpose. Psychological flux and flow may be deduced from door hinges as well as from the second cup of coffee for breakfast or the plaintive lady standing immediately before your hard-won seat in the street car. Jim would never oil the hinge in the morning, because that would somehow imply he expected to come in very late again at night, and he never expected to--in the morning. But her breathing remained regular, absolutely regular; he had this time escaped the snare of the hinge. The gas jet burned in a tiny flame. She had fallen into the habit of keeping a night-light during the past three or four years. At first he had objected that it interfered with his sleep, but she had been singularly persistent about it. She hadn't given him her reasons; indeed, she had never analyzed them. It was nothing but a bit of preposterous feminism, which she kept to herself, that the light made a third in their room. She lay with her back to him, far over on her side of the bed. He could see where her hip rose, and vaguely through the covering the outline of her limbs. Her shoulders were crumpled forward, and the upper one responded to her breathing, and marked it. Under her arm, crossed in front of her, he knew was the swelling of her breast. And then at the neck was the place where the hair was parted and braided, the braids wound forward about her eyes--a very peculiar way to treat one's hair. What a different thing a woman was! He had seen her lying so countless times, and yet the strangeness had never worn off. Indeed, curiously enough, there seemed even more of it now than when they had just married, and she was entirely new.