Betty knit her brows. “Oh,” she murmured, “isn't that too bad. I really haven't a minute. You see--it's a matter of catching a train. I could do it Monday. Or you might call up one of the other girls. I'm awfully sorry. But it's something very important.” Her eyes avoided his. Her color rose a little. She turned away. “Of course,” she was murmuring, “I hate terribly to fail Sue at a time like this--” She moved irresolutely toward the little hall, glanced again at her watch; and suddenly in confusion picked up her bag and hurried out. He could hear her light step in the outer corridor; then the street door. All at sea, he started to follow. At the apartment door he paused. Her key was in the lock; she had not even thought to take it. He removed it, put it in his pocket; then wandered back into the living-room and stood over the telephone, trying to think of some one he could call in. But his rising resentment made clear thinking difficult. He sank into the armchair, crossed his long legs, clasped his hands behind his head, stared at the mantel. On it were Sue's books, in a haphazard row--a few Russian novels (in English translations), Havelock Ellis's _Sex in Relation to Society, Freud on Psychanalysis and Dreams_, two volumes of Schnitzler's plays, Brieux's plays with the Shaw preface, a few others. His gaze roved from the books to the bare walls. They _were_ bare; all Sue's pictures were pinned up on the burlap screen that hid a corner of the room--half a dozen feminist cartoons from _The Masses_, a futuristic impression of her own head by one of the Village artists, two or three strong rough sketches by Jacob Zanin of costumes for a playlet at the Crossroads, an English lithograph of Mrs. Pankhurst. Henry Bates slowly, thoughtfully, filled and lighted his pipe. His brows were knit. The room, in its unfeminine bareness as well as in its pictures and books, breathed of the modern unsubmissive girl. No one had wasted a minute here on “housekeeping.” Here had lived the young woman who, more, perhaps, than any other of the recent lights of the old Village, had typified revolt. She had believed, like the Village about her, not in patriotism but in internationalism, not in the home but in the individual, not in duty and submission, but in experiment and self-expression. Already, like all the older faiths of men, this new religion had its cant, its intolerance of opposition, its orthodoxy. His pipe went out while he sat there flunking about it; the beginnings of the summer twilight softened the harsh room and dimmed the outlines of back fences and rear walls without the not overclean windows.