Alice walked to the alley gate, and fumbled with the cold latch until she had opened it. Fog lay in the lamplit alley like a bright breath. Up and down the street beyond, the cold roofs were heavy on the solid houses. Their dead finality was like a threat against the vague and living dark. Alice felt as though she were rushing out of herself like an unseen storm. She wanted to lose her body in the dark. But, at the end of the alley, people were passing. And she could see the square, turgid as a river, where lights of cabs and automobiles floated, trembled, disappeared, and reappeared again. She was in terror of them. She no longer wanted to be known to herself. She turned, and shut the gate, and ran back up the walk to the house. The kitchen was vacant, bare. A moth spun in zig-zag near the quivering gas flame. On the stove, the pots and pans, crusted with food, leaned together, half upset. There was white oilcloth on the table, and on the floor a scrap of threadbare red carpet. Bread was making in a covered bowl on a shelf back of the stove. The baby's clothes, which Mrs. Farley had been ironing, hung in a corner on a line. On a chair the bread board was laid out with a heel of bread and a large knife. Alice picked up the knife. She wanted to cleave her vision of herself. But she must cleave it surely. She was afraid. She dropped the knife, and, at the clatter, almost ran from the room. She went quickly but very softly up the creaking back stairway. Her breath was choking and guilty. She remembered where Laurie kept his pistol, and she passed into his room and fumbled in the bureau drawer among his clothes. When she had the pistol in her hand, suddenly, she felt sure of herself. She did not want to do it now. Not that night. She was ashamed of having left the dining-room, and decided to go downstairs once more. Before she went, she carried the pistol to her room and hid it. She felt calm. For the first time, it seemed as if her whole body was hers, as in a love embrace. She was not afraid of understanding it. She rested in relief, in intimacy with herself. Nothing separated her from herself. * * * * * Alice threw a gray woolen bathrobe about her over her nightgown, and went downstairs to get the morning paper. Sunlight came over the transom of the street door and blue motes floated down a spreading ladder of light. The light and the whirling motes sank into the soft dingy nap of the carpet as into a vortex. There was a deep spot of radiance, putty colored, like a pool of dust, still in the gloom. Alice opened the door and took the paper in. As she carried it upstairs, the steps creaked under her short, broad, bare feet. She went into her room. The folded paper was slick and cold. It rattled as she opened it. Her eyes ran over the columns and the gray print seemed to shift and dance and come together like the broken figures in a kaleidoscope.