The house now stood out from other houses. What the family had wanted to conceal like a shame was revealed to the world. Their grief no longer belonged to themselves. When they went to a window and looked out their differentness separated them infinitely from the people in the street. They were crushed by their consciousness of separateness. The day was interminable. Toward evening, in the twilight, they sat in the living-room huddled in their chairs. Relaxed by emotion, they looked drunk. Their gestures, as they shifted their postures limply, were the gestures of debauch. With bleered vague eyes, they peered spiritlessly at one another out of the shadows. The sun had gone down and there was only a chilly whiteness in the center of the room and in front of the windows. In the gloom, the drunken people floated in their senseless grief like fish. They stirred languidly, or they got up, took some aimless steps, and resumed their places. No one suggested a light. They were ashamed of their exhaustion and their dry eyes. In terror of not caring enough, they began to talk, dwelling on harrying details in order to wring from each other the stimulus which would draw a little moisture from their dry lids. Really, they were sick with fatigue. They wanted to sleep. They made themselves tense against weariness. They did not know whether, if they made a light, brightness would rouse them from their disgraceful torpor, or merely reveal their plight. Mr. Farley, who had been in the death chamber, came downstairs, and when he stumbled over a stool by the door of the room he lit the gas. Then the reddish glow made jack-o'-lanterns of their swollen, inflamed faces. They saw each other and found that they could cry again. The tears came peacefully now, without effort. Their strength flowed from them under their lids. Their heads floated confusedly above the bodies to which they were secured by their attenuated necks, in which they were conscious of the nausea and indigestion of weakness. The contemplation of so much misery left Mr. Farley as weak as jelly. But in the very completeness of his mental and physical depletion he felt relief. At the moment when he descended from the room where the dead woman lay to the strange twilight inhabited by her sodden family, he gave up. He no longer attempted to escape from his vision of himself. With a feeling of luxury, he admitted his incapacity for change. He was brazen in his inward confession of failure. His ideals were too high. They could never be realized in this life. He could not go back. He had a sense of utter humiliation and failure, yet, at the same time, was subtly grateful for his degradation. The fumes of fatigue permitted a vague indulgence to his self-contempt. He put Helen away from him forever. Death was a bitterness and a peace. * * * * * Alice had set out some cold meat on the table in the dining-room, but no one thought to eat.