Leacraft put down the letter slowly. He was disappointed. A summons to the west, to the mines in Arizona, had reached him just the day before, and he must get out there before a week was over. He had thought to have finished this affair first, and to find in the tiresome trip distraction, if Sally was unfavorable to his appeal, or unexpected interest if he succeeded in winning her assent. Still he could readily accept the invitation. He would be back in May, and, perhaps after all the occasion might be more favorable. Sally softened into a little sympathetic humor by her visit to her sick aunt, and he strengthened by the encouraging reflexion of having successfully dissipated the little cloud of misunderstanding, or worse, at the mines, might produce conditions psychologically adequate to bring about his victory. He stepped to the window. The view from it was always pleasing, at this moment in the descending shades of the closing day and with the vanishing lights hurrying westward beyond the Potomac, it possessed an ineffable loveliness. The great white spectre of the Washington monument, immaterialized and faintly roseate against the softly flaming skies, and brooding genius-like above the trees of the Reservation was always there, and that night it assumed the strangely deceptive but fascinating vagary of an exhalation, as if built up from the emanations of the earth, and the vapors of the air, remaining immobile in the still ether as a portent or a promise. The man’s face grew clouded as the fairy obelisk faded, and with the enveloping darkness became again discernible as a dull and stony pile. That evening Leacraft felt particularly restless and detached. He felt the need of entertainment, and of entertainment of a sort that would fix his faculty of thought, awaken speculation, and immerse him in reasonings and the intricacies of argument. The few theatrical bills presented no attractions more weighty than a clever comedian in a musical farce, a sensational melodrama (“much better,” said Leacraft), and vaudeville. Music was shunned; there was nothing quite serious offered, and then music has so many painful influences on the apprehensive mind, and is turned to such cruel uses in the economy of nature, for making uneasy lovers more agitated. No! he didn’t wish music. Baffled for an instant, he concluded to walk. Muscular exercise, mere translation on one’s legs, is a marvellous remedy for the diabolical blues, and then it can never be told what the Unseen holds for you, if you only go out to meet It in the streets, and amongst other people, hunting, perhaps, like yourself, diversion from their own inscrutable megrims. It--the Unseen--may quite divertingly mix you up in a comedy or a tragedy, or consolingly give you a glimpse of other human miseries immeasurably greater than your own.