Flies buzzed against the walls and fell back upon the half-washed table coverings and the cracked cruets opaque from many fillings. Mr. Farley stirred gray crystals of sugar into the gold-edged blackness of his coffee, then clouded it with the pale blue-auraed milk that brimmed the squat white pitcher. He tried to think things out, but he had nurtured his self-esteem on the verity of abnegation and it was hard for him to accept as a blessing the thing which it had given him so much comfort to do without. Safe in the conviction that there would be no end to his sacrifice, he had allowed full abandon to his mystical and repressed nature. Helen Wilson had become glorified and beyond attainment. He was in terror of seeing her too clearly. When her neat figure, a little stout, emerged distinctly from the chaos of his reflections, he deliberately let down a curtain of confusion across the mirror of his consciousness. * * * * * After dinner Mr. Farley went into the living-room and seated himself in an armchair. He had scarcely exchanged a word with any one during the meal. He bent his head in his hands. The light from the shaded lamp glistened obliquely along the thin parting of his hair and his baldish scalp. Mrs. Farley made pretexts to come near him. In the afternoon she had been mending a nightdress of May's and left it on top of the magazine rack, and now she came to get it. She was a long time putting her sewing things together. Mr. Farley saw her, but he did not stir. Alice had followed her mother into the room and halted abruptly behind her. Mrs. Farley did not see Alice. Mr. Farley started a little, glanced at his daughter, and looked away again. Alice, watching the two people, felt the atmosphere of the room weighted with inertias. These people forced her back into herself, into her own dumbness. She wanted to shatter her silence with their cries. "Turn around here and look at Papa, Mamma," Alice said suddenly. Mrs. Farley would not look. "Your father knows what I think," she said after a minute. She glanced at Alice. Mrs. Farley wore her pince-nez and the irridescence of glass added remoteness to her hostile uneasy eyes. The gold clasp drawing the flesh together on her nose gave a twist of severity to her dry obscure face. Her hate seemed to flow uncertainly through the crystals and flash defiance in the gold center. The little gold clasp of the pince-nez was like the claw of impotence buried in its own flesh. Alice tapped the floor with her foot. "Do you know what Mamma thinks, Papa? I'm sure I don't." Mr. Farley stared under his fingers at the floor where the dim pattern of the carpet grew more dim. "I know what you have told me." "I can't stand the atmosphere here. If you and she don't find some way to talk it out you'll drive Laurence and me insane."