(she apologized for the employment of that phrase but said she knew no
other that was usable). She admitted that she had never had any real
doubt that this was what he had meant to do and conceded him the right to
think that she had invited it. But she found it, nevertheless,
unendurable. She felt unspeakably degraded by it and presently flew into
a rage and turned the man out of the house, feeling, she added, as much
ashamed of that part of the performance as of anything else.

This encounter, she told March, made a profound change in her feeling
about the other episode--closed a door upon it. Nothing like that could
happen to her again. She simply stopped thinking about it after that,
buried it and it had stayed buried comfortably for the better part of a
year, until Rush came home from France. At least she wasn't aware that it
had troubled her. The twinges of discomfort she'd felt whenever she'd
faced the prospect of coming home, she had attributed to another cause
altogether.

"Paula," he observed. "That's easy enough to see."

"Oh, you are a comfort," she said; "only not Paula by herself. Paula and
father and I, in a sort of awkward triangle, all doing our best and all
nagging one another. That has got terribly worse in the last few days."

She seemed to find no difficulty at all in informing him fully about this
home situation; needed only a question or surmise dropped here and there
to develop the whole story.

It wasn't a chronological narrative. Her mind drifted like a soaring
kingfisher over the whole area between her childhood and the events of
this very morning, swooping down here or there to pick up some incident
wherever a gleam of memory attracted her.

Her spirit was finding compensation for the agonies of the past hours in
a complete detachment. Nothing she told him, no matter how close home it
came, seemed to involve any painful emotion. Her body, pressed so close
against his that he could have felt the faintest muscle quiver, conveyed
no message to him but the relaxation of complete security.

About himself there was a curious duality. One of him was lulled
irresistibly into sharing her mood of serene detachment. The other,
recognizing the transitoriness of hers, knowing that when this interlude
came to an end, as come it must, the storm would break upon them once
more, was casting about desperately for the means of saving her.

He had come to see the situation with her own eyes, fairly felt th