Poppa woke up. Instinct told him that he must save Momma and himself from the incredible disaster of her death. His business worries had kept him from noticing the little symptoms of her decline, though she had stopped quarreling with him, and had simply quarreled with life, with everything: the food, the neighbors, her clothes, the weather, her stummick, her head, her eyes, her feet, her hands, her appetite, her looks--she even complained of her looks! And now, as if scales had been scraped off his eyes, Poppa saw that Momma didn’t look good. She didn’t look a bit good. She looked something scandalous. Poppa belonged to a lodge, and he had gone to numberless funerals. Yet he had hardly even imagined that some day his fellow members might in turn come to his house, all dressed up with sashes and plumes and swords, to march alongside the black wagon that should carry his one woman in a box to a ditch. As if some one had set a moving picture going against the wall of his own sitting room, he saw the whole thing, and he shuddered back from it with a cry that struck inward and cut downward and stuck. He had a fishbone in his throat. He became suddenly young and arrantly afraid. He wanted to run to his wife and cling to her and beg her not to think of such things. But he had given up the habit of hugging Momma or taking her into his lap or sitting on the arm of her chair since the ancient days when the first child began to take notice. He wanted to go back to the old ways, but it would have looked foolish, and the two frumps had been afraid of each other’s love for years and years. He did nothing and said nothing; but he did a heap of thinking. “Heap” was the word, for his thoughts were like a pile of dead leaves, tarnished, crumpled brown leaves that had been green and radiant and breathing once. His thoughts were a heap of autumnal rubbish set on fire. Red torment ran through them, and they writhed and twisted as if a new life had come back to them just that they might suffer a little more. The terror stung him to a determination. “I’ll call the doctor,” he said. He rose from his chair and shuffled to the telephone. Momma ran after him and dragged his hands down, crying: “I don’t want to see that old fool. I’ll go jump in the river if you send for him. I couldn’t stand the sight of him.” “When a woman’s too sick to see the doctor,” Poppa said, “it’s high time somebody called him in.” He backed round and bunted her away with the minimum of grace and the maximum of devotion, and held her at a distance until he got the number. Momma flopped helplessly into a chair and cried like a petulant little girl, while Poppa ordered the doctor to put on his shoes and come right over.