, but it seemed to him he still saw her
against the window, his eyes bringing to him a vision of her face as she
had looked.

He had grown white. In the memory of her face, as in an impossible
mirror, he saw a loathsome image of himself. Her eyes had blazed with
it. He sickened and his thought grew faint. Then the night came before
him and the echo of the words Rachel had spoken beat in his head. He
walked with his hat politely in his hand out of the door.

On the stairs his eyes grew weak and warm. Tears rushed from them. He
stumbled and clutched at the banister. She had led him on. She had
looked at him with love. Love ... but he had dreamed that. What was it,
then? Her eyes burning toward him had told him he was loathsome. There
was something wrong with him. He wept. He put his hat on mechanically.
He dried his eyes. There was something wrong.

On her bed Rachel lay mumbling to herself, mumbling as if the words were
a pain to her ears. "Erik Dorn ... Erik Dorn."

CHAPTER VI

The world in which Erik Dorn lived was compounded of many surfaces. Of
them Anna, his wife, was the most familiar. It was a familiarity of
absorption. Weeks of intimacy passed between them, of lover-like
attentiveness during which Dorn remained unconscious of her existence.
Her unending talk of her love for him--words and murmurs that seemed an
inexhaustible overflow of her heart--passed through his mind as a part
of his own thought. Hers was a more definite contribution to the
emptiness of the life through which he moved.

Yet in his unconsciousness of her there lived a shadowy affection. On
occasions in which they had been separated there had always awakened in
him an uneasiness. In his nights alone he lay sleepless, oppressed, a
nostalgia for her presence growing in him. With his eyes opened at the
darkness of a strange room he experienced then an incompleteness as if
he himself were not enough. The emptiness in which he was living became
suddenly real. He would feel a despair. Words unlike the sophisticated
patter of his usual thought would come to him.... "What is there ... I
would like something ... what?..." A sense of life as an unpeopled
vastness would frighten him vaguely. Night sounds ... strange,
shadow-hidden walls. They made him uneasy. Memories then; puzzling,
mixed-up pictures that had lost their outlines. Things that had left no
impression on his thought--sterile little incidents through which he had
moved with aut