She was a bursting healthy creature, not yet thirty but ripe and matronly and at her ease. She wore a pink gauze waist over a covering of creamy silk that lashed about the rondures of her breast as if its task were desperate against the fullness of all that flesh. She was not fat oppressively. Her form was impetuous against the insipid continence of silk and satin. Her cheeks and her lips were almost equally red. They were in perpetual motion with food or with laughter--at times with both. Her hands were short and slight: a wedding ring and two obtrusive diamonds overloaded the fingers. She seemed not to mind the floating gaze of David. She talked with greater lubrication when his warm eyes were on her. David, listening a little as at times to music, had the sense of clover fields astir with bees: cows brooding in heat and the smell of milk like mist upon the air. His pleasure of this buxom woman, whose fine hands showed her sensitive as well, was like his pleasure of warm spring days in his boyhood, when indeed the women had been drawn and dry enough but the fields very like this amiable matron, murmuring strange words across his table. Most of the men and women he had known bore no kinship even to the soil they labored. This woman seemed a part of earth. It was a new sense for David. He leaned back, sweetly astir with his mood. It was over his loneliness like a miracle, like a sudden bloom of sun and meadow in the dank streets of the City. It glowed just so bright and wondrous, it was just so unreal.... He and the strange woman of whom he had no desire became one: there was a flower in this subtle penetration of her health and of his mood. About them the heavy clouds of smoke and the thick waves of words, all the heaving clamor of the room was like the shadow beyond the burn of a candle. And beyond still farther, the sudden laceration of the cars, the pound of the elevated trains, the wreathing weight of the bleak City.... In the heart of it all the single being of David. He took in fragrance of this outlandish woman as a bee sucks honey. He was alone with fertile fields.... He got up, he went to the telephone in the side office of the café, he called Constance Bardale. “This is David Markand. I want to come to see you to-night.” She seemed to hesitate: then: “Yes. You may come.” He had not seen her at all in two months. He had never called on her alone. He had met her a few times. But always she had that forbidding smile and the sinuous smile he had known first was hidden away. It was as if she pitied him for a certain deep defect. She never sought him out. When they spoke, she had nothing to say. She had not again asked him to call. Now, all at once, though five minutes before he had not dreamed of it, he was to be with her alone! There was a sharp tremor through him as if he longed to leap but the time was not yet, so that he was impeded: a tremor like that of a race horse at the post.