Afterward they sat upon the step and smoked matutinal cigarettes. The day gathered in a shimmering haze above the vivid com, the emerald of the shorn fields; the birds had already subsided from the heat among the leaves. Anthony saw that the lamps of the car were still alight, a feeble yellow flicker, and turned them out. He tested the engine; and, finding it still running, turned with an unspoken query to Annot. She rose slowly. The wrap slipped from her bare shoulders and her dinner gown with its high sulphur girdle, the scrap of black lace about her hair, presented a strange, brilliantly artificial picture against the blistered, gaunt boards of the store, with, at its back, the open sunny space of pasture, wood and sky. “It's barely twenty miles back,” she told him, once more settled at his side. The old man regarded them from under one gnarled palm, the other tightly clasped about the broom handle; his jaw was dropped; incredulity, senile surprise, claimed him for their own. With Annot, Anthony reflected, he was everlastingly getting into new situations; she seemed to lift him out of the ordinary course of events into a perverse world of her own, a front-backward land where the unexpected, without rule or obligation, continually happened; and, what was strangest of all, without any of the dark consequences which he had been taught must inevitably follow such departures. He recalled the incredulous smiles, the knowing insinuations, that would have greeted the exact recounting of the past night at Doctor Allhop's drugstore. He would himself, in the past, have regarded such a tale as a flimsy fabrication. And suddenly he perceived dimly, in a mind unused to such abstractions, the veil of ugliness, of degradation, that hung so blackly about the thoughts of men. He gazed with a new sympathy and comprehension at the scornful line of Annot's vivid young lips; something of her superiority, her contempt, was communicated to him. She became aware of his searching gaze, and smiled in an intimate, friendly fashion at him. “You are the most comfortable person alive,” she told him. There was nothing critical in her tones now. “I said that you were not a good chauffeur, and--” the surroundings grew familiar, they had nearly reached their destination, and an impalpable reserve fell upon her, but she continued to smile at him, “and... you are not.” That was the last word she addressed to him that day. As, later, he sluiced the automobile with water, he recalled the strange intimacy of the night, her warm and sympathetic voice; once she had steadied herself with a clinging hand upon his shoulder. These new attributes of the person who, shortly, passed him silently and with cold eyes, stirred his imagination; they were potent, rare, unsettling. XLIII