this, and pictured him walking along a street in the rain, and immediately and with instinctive foreknowledge of what she would find, she went to the closet beneath the stairs and opened the door. It was as she hadknown: his overcoat and raincoat both hung there; the chances were he didn’t even have an umbrella, and again irritation and exasperation and untroubled affection for him welled in her, and it was as it had been of old again, and all that had since happened to them rolled away.
Heretofore her piano had always been moved into the living room when cold weather came. But this year it stood yet in the smaller alcove. There was a fireplace here, but no fire had been lighted yet, and the room was chilly. Beneath her hands the cold keys gave forth a sluggish chord, accusing, reproving too; and she returned to the fire again and stood before it where she could see through the window the drive beneath its sombre, dripping trees. The small clock on the mantel behind her chimed twelve, and she went to the window and stood with her nose touching the chill glass and her-breath misting it over. Soon, now: he was erratic in his hours, but never tardy, and every time an umbrella came into sight, her heart leaped a little. But it was not he, and she followed the bearer’s plodding passage until he shifted the umbrella enough for her to see who it was and so did not see Horace until he was half way up the drive. His hat was turned down around his face and his coat collar was hunched to his ears, and as she had known, he didn’t even have an umbrella.
“Oh, you idiot,” she said and ran to the door and through the curtained glass she saw his shadowy shape come leaping up the steps. He flung the door open and entered, whipping his sodden hat against his leg, andso did not see her until she stepped forth. “You idiot,” she said. “Where’s your raincoat?”
For a moment he stared at her with his wild and diffident repose, then he said “Narcy!” and his face lighted and he swept her into his wet arms.
“Don’t!” she cried. “You’re wet!” But he swung her from the floor, against his sodden chest, repeating Narcy, Narcy; then his cold nose was against her face and she tasted rain.
“Narcy,” he said again, tagging her, and she ceased trying to free herself and clung to him. Then abruptly he released her and jerked his head up and stared at her with sober intensity.
“Narcy,” he said, still staring at her, “has that surly black-guard...?”
“No, of course not,” she answered sharply. “Haveyou gone crazy?” Then she clung to. him again, wetclothes and all, asthough she would never let him go.“Oh, Horry,” she said, “I’ve been a beast to you!”
“I was hoping” he said—they had eaten the chocolate pie and Horace now stood before the living-room fire, his coffee cup on the mantel, striking matches to his pipe, “that you might have come home for good! That they had sent you back.”
“No,” she answered. “I wish…”
“What?”
But she only said: “You’ll be having somebody, soon.” And then: “When is it to be, Horry?”
He sucked intently at his pipe; in his eyes little twin matchflames rose and fell. “I don’t know. Next spring, I suppose. Whenever she will.”
“You don’t want to,” she stated quietly. “Not after what it’s all got to be now.”
“She’s in Reno now,” he added, puffing at his pipe, his face averted a little. “Little Belle wrote me a letter about mountains.”
She said: “Poor Harry.” She sat with her chin in her palms, gazing into the fire.
“He’ll have little Belle,” he reminded her. “He cares more forher than be does for Belle, anyway.”
“You don’t know,” she told him soberly. “You just say that because you want to believe it”
“Don’t you think he’s well off, rid of a-woman who doesn’t want him, who doesn’t even love his child very much?”
“You don’t know,” she repeated. “People can’t—can’t—You can’t play fast and loose with the way things ought to go on, after they’ve started off.”
“Oh, people.” He raised the cup and drained it, and sat down. “Barging around through a lifetime, clotting for no reason, breaking apart for no reason still. Chemicals. No need to pity a chemical.”
“Chemicals,” she mused, her serene face rosy in the firelight. “Chemicals. Maybe that’s the reason so many of the things people do smell bad.”
“Well, I don’t know that I ever thought of it in exactly that way,” he answered gravely. “But I daresay you’re right, having femininity on your side.” He brooded himself, restlessly. “But I suppose it’s all sort of messy: living and seething corruption glossed over for a while by smoothly colored flesh; all foul, until the clean and. naked bone.” He mused again, she quietly beside him. “But it’s something there, something you go after; must; driven. Not always swine. A plan somewhere, I suppose, known to Whoever first set the fermentation going. Perhaps ifs just too big to be seen, like a locomotive is a porous mongrel substance without edges to the grains of sand that give it traction on wet rails. Or perhaps He has forgotten Himself what the plan was.”
“But do you like to think of a woman who’ll willingly give up her child in order to marry another man a little sooner?”
“Of course I don’t. But neither do I like to remember that I have exchanged you for Belle, or that she has red hair and is going to be fat someday, or that she has lain in another pan’s arms and has a child that isn’t mine, even though she did voluntarily give it up. Yet there are any number of virgins who love children walking the world today, some of whom look a little like you, probably, and a modest number of which I allow myself to believe, without conceit, that I could marry. And yet...” He struck another match to his pipe, but he let it go out again and sat forward in his chair, the pipe held loosely in his Joined hands. “That may be the secret, after all. Not any subconscious striving after what we believed will be happiness, contentment; but a sort of gadfly urge after the petty, ignoble impulses which man has tried so vainly to conjure with words out of himself. Nature, perhaps, watching him as he tries to wean himself away from the rank and richly foul old mire that spawned him, biding her time and flouting that illusion of purifaction which he has foisted upon himself and calls his soul. But it’s something there, somethingyou—you—” He brooded upon the fire, holding his cold pipe. She put her hand out and touched his, and he clasped it and looked at her with his groping and wid6 intensity. But she was gazing into the fire, her cheek in her palm, and she drew his hand to her and stroked it on her face.
“Poor Horry,” she said.
“Not happiness,” he repeated. “I’m happier now than I’ll ever be again. You don’t find that, when you suddenly swap the part of yourself which you want least, for the half of someone else that he or she doesn’t want. Do you? Did you find it?”
