Eldridge rose and stretched himself above her. He looked down at her--at the swift-moving hands and grey closeness of her dress. He would like to take her in his hands and crush out of her the thoughts--make her speak out the thoughts that followed the swift-going needle; he did not know that he wanted this--he was only feeling over and over, in some deep, angry place--“What the devil was she doing there? What the----” He moved about the room a minute and ’went out. The woman by the table sewed on. A bolt shot in the front hall and Eldridge’s feet mounted the stairs slowly. Then the room was quiet--only the clock and the needle. Presently the needle stopped--the woman’s hands lay folded in her lap. The figure was motionless, the head bent--only across her face moved the little smile.... The clock travelled round and whirred its warning note and struck, and she only stirred a little, as if a breath escaped her, and took up her work, looking at it blindly. A sound came in the hall and she looked up. He stood in the doorway, his old dressing-gown wrapped around him, his hands gaunt, with the little hairs at the wrist uncovered by cuffs. She looked at him, smiling absently. There was something almost beautiful in her face as she lifted it to him--“When are you coming to bed?” he asked harshly. “Why, right now, Eldridge--I must have been dreaming.” She gathered up the work from her lap. “I hope I haven’t kept you awake.” He stood looking at her a minute. Then he wheeled about without response. His feet beneath the bath gown moved awkwardly. But the spine in the bath gown had a cold, dignified, offended look--a kind of grotesque stateliness--as it disappeared through the doorway. The woman looked after it, the little, gathering smile still on her face. Then she turned toward the lamp and put it out, and the radiant smile close to the lamp became a part of the dark. III BY morning it had become a dream. Eldridge was late and he hurried from the house and hurried all the morning to catch up. By luncheon time he was in another world. He took plenty of time for his luncheon; it was one of the things he had learned--to eat his luncheon slowly and take time to digest it. Sometimes he read the paper, sometimes he dropped into a moving-picture show for a few minutes afterward. But to-day he did neither. He sat in the restaurant--it was a crowded restaurant, all America coming and going--and he watched it idly. He had a rested, comfortable feeling, as if he had escaped some calamity. It seemed foolish now, as he looked back--a kind of fever in the blood that had twisted the commonest things into queer shape. He looked back over it dispassionately--it was the woman in Merwin’s who had started it, of course; there _was_ something about her--something like Rosalind--curiously like her--it was like what Rosalind _might_ have been, more than what she was--a kind of spirited-up Rosalind! He smiled grimly.