As he sat there facing the window, looking out unseeingly at the lighted facade of the building opposite, the strains of dance music reached him, and he saw couples float past the windows of the hall on the floor opposite his own. He watched and listened with a kind of dull fascination, for a long time.... He was very tired. He thought of going to bed. But that music from across the street would never stop—it would keep on with its silly gaiety hour after hour. He rose at last and went out. He was going to his work-room. He could spend several hours cleaning up there—destroying manuscripts he didn’t want to keep, reducing the amount of things to be moved to a minimum. Phyllis might be in her room.... He thought of her there, and the thought comforted him. He saw her again, in his thoughts, as he had seen her first—serene and kind and strong. It was good to think of her. Still his mind did not quite encompass the situation. It was as though something had happened to him—something stupendous, terrible, and almost unbearable, like the death of a beloved friend—something not wholly to be realized. And it had the resistlessness of some such event; he did not conceive it as something within his power to alter or prevent—nor in any sense as something which he had done himself. If he had thought of himself as having done this thing, he might have thought of undoing it. But it was a thing which had happened, like an earthquake.... In his room he gathered up fragments of manuscript—jottings of ideas, efforts, experiments, unfinished things—and tore them up after a casual glance. There would be little to take with him. That was good.... He had the feeling that a new life had begun for him, a life at which he still stared in vague bewilderment, like a creature painfully new-born into an uncomprehended world. 2 He could hear Phyllis moving about on the other side of the partition. He finished his work; the wastebasket was full of torn manuscript, and his Roget’s Thesaurus and his favourite penholder lay together on the table, ready to take to his new home. He no longer had need of a work-room, a special refuge from the distracting intimacies of marriage. He was free from all that. Yes—think of that—free!... He laughed out loud. Presently Phyllis would come and knock on his door. She had heard him enter, she knew he was there. He wanted to see her, he wanted the comfort of her eyes, her hands. He wanted her serenity, her kindness, her strength. But he lacked even the energy to ask for it. He could only sit and wait until she came to him. He felt as though the last strength he possessed were being used up in some terrific effort—an effort that would cease when she came. Then it would make no difference that he had no strength left—her courage and kindness would sustain him.