“I should say--Mrs. Severance--that there was something you needed and wanted and didn't have at present. And that you would probably have it--in the end.” She laughs a little. “Rather cryptic, isn't that, doctor? And you'd prescribe?” “Prescribe? 'It's an awkward matter to play with souls.'” “'And trouble enough to save your own,'” she completes the quotation. “Yes, that's true enough--though I'm sorry you can't even tell me to use this twice a day in half a glass of water and that other directly after each meal. I think I'll have to be a little more definite when it comes to your turn--if it does come.” “Oh it will.” But instead of beginning, he raises his eyes to her again. This time there is a heaviness like sleep on both, a heaviness that draws both together inaudibly and down, and down, as if they were sinking through piled thickness on thickness of warm, sweet-scented grass. Odd faces come into both minds and vanish as if flickered off a film--to Rose Severance, a man narrow and flat as if he were cut out of thin grey paper, talking, talking in a voice as dry and rattling as a flapping windowblind of their “vacation” together and a house with a little garden where she can sew and he can putter around,--to Ted, Elinor Piper, the profile pure as if it were painted on water, passing like water flowing from the earth in springs, in its haughty temperance, its retired beauty, its murmurous quiet--other faces, some trembling as if touched with light flames, some calm, some merely grotesque with longing or too much pleasure--all these pass. A great nearness, fiercer and more slumbrous than any nearness of body takes their place. It wraps the two closer and closer, a spider spinning a soft web out of petals, folding the two with swathes and swathes of its heavy, fragrant silk. “Oh--mine--isn't anything,” says Ted rather unsteadily, after the moment. “Only looking at firelight and wanting to take the coals in my hands.” Rose's voice is firmer than his but her mouth is still moved with content at the thing it has desired being brought nearer. “I really can't prescribe on as little evidence as that,” she says with music come back to her voice in the strength of a running wave. “I can only repeat what you told me. That there was something you needed--and wanted”--she is mocking now--“and didn't have at present. And that you would probably--what was it?--oh yes--have it, in the end.” The wispy little woman has crept up to Ted's elbow with an illegible bill. Rose has spoken slowly to give her time to get there--it is always so much better to choose your own most effective background for really affecting scenes. “And now I really must be getting back,” she cuts in briskly, her fingers playing with a hat that certainly needs no rearrangement, when Ted, after absent-mindedly paying the bill, is starting to speak in the voice of one still sleep-walking.