Mr. Farley knew his wife's abstraction was intended as a rebuke to him, but he wanted to hide behind it. Her continually averted face bewildered him, and at the same time left him grateful. His life had been ruined. He had sacrificed everything. And now he was offered the opportunity to escape. Since Helen had left the city again, the project for their future which had been forced into his mind appeared to him as a dream out of which he had been allotted the impossible task of making reality. His wife, concentrating herself upon household things, seemed to him strong and natural. She had ground under her feet. She had selected the carpet she walked on. It was hers. When he passed through a room where she was at work and she swept dust into his eyes, he did not rebel. The grit in his eyes was the truth of her right. He had no carpet and no house in which to make his dream. He knew that, even though he had bought the house, it was hers, because she wanted it. In his uncertainty he was ashamed before her because her wants were so definite and limited. Sometimes, in his confusion, he passed judgment upon himself before he knew whom it was that he judged. In a panic, he tried to find some sure conception of himself to hold against the ebb and flow of his irresolution. Winnie's precarious health gave him the loophole he needed. Until the baby was born, he must hold in abeyance the contemplation of his own affairs. He owed it to her. "Poor little Winnie!" he often said. "I miss her so when she is not at meals. She should be the first thought of all of us now. We should let our individual problems go until we can see her through her trouble." His wife understood that he was excusing himself for what he had not done. In the beginning of their disagreement, when she was frightened with the strangeness of her situation, she had waited, in a numb agony of quiescence, for the first legal steps to be taken. Nothing had occurred, and she still waited. But there was furtive listening in her attitude. She listened and, in spite of herself, was glad. * * * * * The gas jet was shaded so that the glow fell only on half the bed where the footboard made darkness like an echo on the wall. Winnie's supper, untasted, was in a tray on a chair: tea, black with long standing, and shriveled toast on a chipped plate. On the chest of drawers, glasses and medicine bottles marked themselves in separate blackness against the blank brilliant yellow-papered wall. In front of them was a china holder with a bent candle beside which some one had laid the rust-pink core of an apple. About the big looking-glass the frame of purplish wood was rich with satin reflections, but the glass it surrounded was gray and still and mirrored a part of the bed and the German print as though they were a long way off. The fire had burned low and the room was hot and had a close smell.