On the threshold of her room, the telegram crumpled in her hand, the telephone bell arrested her. Stanley, surely; he must have felt the same need that she had! She fumbled uncertainly with the receiver; the tears were running down her cheeks. She had waited too long; she had exacted the impossible of herself. "Yes--yes? It's you, darling?" She laughed it out through her weeping. "What's that? It's Jim. That you, Nona?" a quiet voice came back. When had Jim's voice ever been anything but quiet? "Oh, Jim, dear!" She gulped down tears and laughter. "Yes--what is it? How awfully early you are!" "Hope I didn't wake you? Can I drop in on my way down town?" "Of course. When? How soon?" "Now. In two minutes. I've got to be at the office before nine." "All right. In two minutes. Come straight up." She hung up the receiver, and thrust the telegram aside. No time to rush out with it now. She would see Jim first, and send off her message when he left. Now that her decision was taken she felt tranquil and able to wait. But anxiety about Jim rose and swelled in her again. She reproached herself for having given him so little thought for the last two days. Since her parting from Stan on the doorstep in the rainy night everything but her fate and his had grown remote and almost indifferent to her. Well; it was natural enough--only perhaps she had better not be so glib about Aggie Heuston's selfishness! Of course everybody who was in love was selfish; and Aggie, according to her lights, was in love. Her love was bleak and cramped, like everything about her; a sort of fleshless bony affair, like the repulsive plates in anatomical manuals. But in reality those barren arms were stretched toward Stanley, though she imagined they were lifted to God... What a hideous mystery life was! And yet Pauline and her friends persisted in regarding it as a Sunday school picnic, with lemonade and sponge cake as its supreme rewards... Here was Jim at her sitting-room door. Nona held out her arms, and slanted a glance at him as he bent his cheek to her kiss. Was the cheek rather sallower than usual? Well, that didn't mean much: he and she were always a yellow pair when they were worried! "What's up, old man? No--this armchair's more comfortable. Had your coffee?" He let her change the armchair, but declined the coffee. He had breakfasted before starting, he said--but she knew Lita's household, and didn't believe him. "Anything wrong with Exhibit A?" "Wrong? No. That is..." She had put the question at random, in the vague hope of gaining time before Lita's name was introduced; and now she had the sense of having unwittingly touched on another problem. "That is--well, he's nervous and fidgety again: you've noticed?" "I've noticed." "Imagining things--. What a complicated world our ancestors lived in, didn't they?" "Well, I don't know. Mother's world always seems to me alarmingly simple."