This afternoon in the late spring, Sarah stood alone in the room, before the oval mirror of her bureau. She was examining herself. Marsden lay muffled up on the porch. Quincy was asleep in the room that had been Marsden’s. The two windows facing forward to the street were open; but Sarah had thrown-to the shutters. The cries of the other children came up from the lawn--joyous, sharp, petulant variations on the theme of youth. Sarah could hear them well, and love them. A portion of her senses was forever fixed on them, interpreting their moods, primed to detect a signal of distress or danger as they romped on, and to rush down in help. Since the accident to Marsden, even in sleep she was a half-cocked trigger of anxieties, a wrack of nerves singing with strain. But this was spring. And Sarah was only thirty-three. However her mind might bend to the deep business of her children, the eyes that looked at her from the mirror were not so much a mother’s as a woman’s. She had come up to change her waist. She lingered, undressed, trying to understand. For Sarah knew that the reason given by Josiah was a pretext. There was but one truth, though there were a thousand reasons. That truth was--coldness. To Josiah, Sarah was no longer a woman to be loved. So, with the spring sun splintering through the shutters, Sarah looked at herself and tried to understand. The room was in shadow. It appeared cramped and painful with its low ceiling and its dash of red flowers on the wall, its heavy draperies, and its unhappy beds. The bureau was between the shuttered windows. And where stood Sarah, a sun’s ray fell on her breast, one lighted a spray from her dull mass of hair, another shot aslant her arm, pointing its poverty of curve, its pathos of angle and declivity where the flesh fell in and the bone ridged out. Yes:--she looked old enough. And yet, all that had once been lovable was still somehow there.