“You women and your nerves and your heads! Are you all alike? Get out and get some exercise. Keep down your gasoline bills and it will send your spirits up. There’s such a thing as having it too good.” She tried to meet him in lighter vein after that, dressing her most bizarrely, and greeting him one night in a batik gown, a new process of dyeing that could be flamboyant and narrative in design. This one, a long, sinuous robe that enveloped her slimness like a flame, beginning down around the train in a sullen smoke and rushing up to her face in a burst of crimson. He thought her so exquisitely rare that he was not above the poor, soggy device of drinking his dinner-wine from the cup of her small crimson slipper, and she dangled on his knee like the dangerous little flame she none too subtly purported to be, and he spanked her quickly and softly across the wrists because she was too nervous to hold the match steadily enough for his cigar to take light, and then kissed away all the mock sting. But the next morning, at the fateful hour four o’clock, and in spite of four sleeping-drops, Lottie on the cot at the foot of her bed and the night-light burning, she awoke on the crest of such a shriek that a stiletto might have slit the silence, the end of the sheet crammed up and into her mouth, and, ignoring all of Lottie’s calming, sat up on her knees, her streaming eyes on the jointure of wall and ceiling, where the open accusing ones of Gerald looked down at her. It was not that they were terrible eyes. They were full of the sweet blue, and clear as lakes. It was only that they knew. Those eyes _knew_. _They knew!_ She tried the device there at four o’clock in the morning of tearing up the still unpaid check to the Ivy Funeral Rooms, and then she curled up in bed with her hand in the negro maid’s, and her face half buried in the pillow. “Help me, Lottie,” she begged; “help me!” “Law, pore child! Gettin’ the horrors every night this away! I’ve been through it before with other ladies. But I never saw a case of the sober horrors befoh. Looks like they’s the worst of all. Go to sleep, child. I’se holdin’.” You see, Lottie had looked in on life where you and I might not. A bird’s-eye view may be very, very comprehensive, but a domestic-eye view can sometimes be very, very close. And then, one night, after Hester had beat her hands down into the mattress and implored Gerald to close his accusing eyes and she had screamed and sobbed up against the jointure, she sat up in bed, waiting for the first streak of dawn to show itself, railing at the pain in her head. “God, my head! Rub it, Lottie. My head! My eyes! The back of my neck!”