There they had to stop. Helen had a vision of the closed topics between them, a sudden horror of this cleavage. Suppose he didn’t see that he was foolish, that she was not treating him badly, that she must lay up something for herself as a person against the day when he himself might weary of her as a woman. Fiercely she recast her arguments in her own mind. Yet there was that tired look in his eyes. You can fight rancor but not weariness. “How is Miss Thorstad getting on?” “Fine. It was a great hunch. You know she actually saves me a lot of thinking. It shows that a girl with wits is worth half a dozen expert stenographers. She has an air about her that is dignified and calm and yet she’s not a stick.” “I imagine there’s a volcanic soul under that rather calm exterior.” “Perhaps.” “Gage, you look tired.” He made a visible effort to rouse himself. “Tired? Why, no, dear. Not especially.” “What are we to do to-night?” “I have some work to-night.” She looked somewhat baffled as the door closed after him a half hour later. Then going to the telephone she called Margaret. Margaret was not at home. Helen read for an hour and went to bed early. Gage had meant to work. But he was not working. He was fighting on through a cloud of bitterness and of thoughts which he knew were not wholly unreasonable. He was sitting at his littered desk, all the paraphernalia of work strewn about him and a picture of Helen on his desk confronting him, accenting his trouble. There she was. He had only to close his eyes and he saw her even more clearly, breaking through the clouded doubts of his mind as she had done in the first days of his marriage--clearness, peace, the one real beauty in the world, the one real truth in the world--Helen--love. And she had said she wanted to be “clean of sex!” He scowled at the thought but it danced before him defiling his memories. It would not go! From those early days, those days of the “hardening process” there had persisted always in Gage secret faith, fading now to a hope, flaring now to a conviction that sex was clean, was beautiful until some other agency defiled it. He remembered still his tortured adolescent mind revolving around the problems of the mysteries of birth, stirring him to wonder and the leering clandestine ugly talk which seemed an ugly wrapping around the wonder. He had always thought that his son would have no such tortures. His own proven conviction would carry the boy through all doubts. Now he seemed cast back in the mire of his own old doubts. Had Helen always felt defiled? Had all their life been a hideous mixture of shame and complacencies and hidden revulsions? Had they really conquered nothing? Or was there nothing to conquer? Was he over-fastidious, unmanly? Was the necessary thing to blunt once more, this time permanently, these illusions of his--to go home to Helen and play the part of the demanding husband, demanding concession in return for concession? Laugh at her