s with an amorous
diction that echoed her own. He would hold her in his arms, bestowing
kisses upon her, and watch as in wonder of some mysterious make-believe,
the radiance that his meaningless gestures brought to her.

There were times, however, when Dorn became aware of his wife, when she
thrust herself before him as a far-away-eyed and beautiful-faced
stranger. He had frequently followed her in the street, watching her
body sway as she walked, observing with quickening surprise her trim,
lyre-like shoes, her silken ankles, the agile sensualism of her
litheness under a stranger's dress. He had noticed that she had coils of
red hair with bronze and gold lights slipping over it, that her face
tilted itself with a hint of determination and her eyes walked proudly
over the heads of the crowd. He watched other men glimpse her and turn
for an instant to follow with their stares the promise of her body and
lighted face. Dorn, walking out of her sight, got a confused sense of
her as if she were speaking to the street, "I am a beautiful woman. In
my head are thoughts. I am a stranger to you. You do not know what my
body looks like or what dreams live in me. I have destinations and
emotions that are mysterious to you. I am somebody different from
yourselves."

On top of this sense of her had come each time a sudden vivid
picture--Anna in their bedroom attaching her garters to the tops of her
stockings; Anna tautening her body as she slipped out of her nightgown
... or a picture of her pressing his head against her breasts and
whispering passionately, "Erik, I adore you." The strangeness then would
leave her and again she was something he had absorbed. When he looked
for her she had vanished in the scribble of the crowd and he walked with
the same curious unconsciousness of her existence as of his own.

There were times too in their home when Anna became a reality before his
eyes--an external that startled him. This was such a time now. Rachel
had come to visit them. She sat silent, fugitive-bodied amid overfed,
perspiring-eyed guests. And he stood looking at Anna and listening to
her.

He wondered why he looked at Anna and not at Rachel. But his wife in
black velvet and silken pumps, like a well-limned character out of some
work of stately fiction, held his attention. He desired to talk to her
as if she were a stranger. She sat without surprise at his unusual
verbal animation in her behalf, listening to his banter with an