had felt confused
when she entered the room, as if she had grown strange to herself.

"Who am I?" she whispered suddenly. She raised her hand and stared at
it. Something intimate had left her. She remembered herself as in a
dream. There had been another Rachel who used to sit in this chair
looking out of the window. A memory came of people and days. But it was
not her memory, because her mind felt free of the nausea it used to
bring.

She stood up quickly and turned on a light. Her dexterous hands twisted
her hair back into loose coils on her head. Strange, she did not know
herself. That was because things seemed different. Here was her room,
littered with books and canvasses and clothes, and the bed in which she
slept, half hidden by the alcove curtains. But they were different. She
began to hum a song. A tune had come back to her that men sang in Little
Russia trudging home from the wheat fields. That was long ago when the
world was a bad dream that frightened her at night. Now there was no
world outside, but a darkness without faces or streets--a darkness with
a deep meaning. It was something to be breathed in and felt.

She opened the window and stood wondering. She was lonely. Loneliness
caressed her heart and drew dim fingers across her thought. She could
never remember having been lonely before. But now there was a
difference. She smiled. Of course, it was Erik Dorn. He had pleased
her. The things he had said returned to her mind. They seemed very
important, as if she had said them herself. She would go out and walk
again--fast. It was pleasant to be lonely. Her throat shivered as she
breathed. Bewildered in the lighted room she laughed and her lips said
aloud, "I don't know. I don't know!"

* * * * * *

Among the men who had established themselves as friends of Rachel was a
young attorney named George Hazlitt. He had gone to school with her in a
small Wisconsin town. A year ago he had discovered her again in Chicago.
The discovery had excited him. He was a young man with proprietary
instincts. He had at once devoted them to Rachel. After several months
he had begun to dream about her. They were correct and estimable dreams
reflecting credit upon the correct and estimable stock from which he
came.

He fell to courting Rachel tenaciously, torn between a certainty that
she was insane and a conviction that a home, a husband's love, and the
paraphernalia of what he termed clean, health