istance. Paper faces and paper eyes--fluttering masks suspended
politely above fabrics that lounged in chairs. They were unreal--too
unreal even to talk to. Beyond these figures in the room and the noises
they made, lay something that was not unreal. It pulled at the sleep in
him. He stood as if arrested by his own silence. The night outside the
window came into his eyes, covering the words in his brain and leaving
him alone.

He heard Anna speaking.

"What are you thinking about, Erik?"

Her eyes seemed to him laden with forebodings. Yet she was smiling.
There was something that made her afraid. He turned toward Rachel and
found her standing as if in imitation of himself, her face lifted toward
the window, the taut line of her neck an attitude that brought him the
image of a white bird's wing soaring. He felt himself unable to speak,
as if a hand had been laid threateningly on his throat. Rachel was
indiscreet to stand that way, to look that way. There was no mistaking.
His thought, shaking itself free of words ... "In love with me. In love
with me!" He paused. A bewildering sense of infidelity. But he had done
nothing--only walk with her a few afternoons. And talk. "A stupid,
nervous little girl." It was some sort of game, not serious necessarily.
He stepped abstractedly toward his wife, aware that the conversation had
flattened.

"I wasn't thinking," he answered, searching guiltily for an epigram.
"Won't you play?"

Anna stood up and brought her eyes to a level with his own. Again the
light of foreboding, of unrevealed shadows flashed at him out of her
smile. She understood something not clear in his own head; nor in hers.
He grasped her hand as she passed and with a dolorous grimace of his
heart felt it unresponsive in his fingers.

Anna was playing from a piano score of _Parsifal_. The music dropped a
curtain. Dorn became conscious of himself in an overheated room
surrounded by a group of awed and saccharine faces. Rachel was smiling
at him with a meaning that he seemed to have forgotten. He stared back,
pleasantly aware that a familiar sneer had returned to his eyes. In a
corner his father sat watching Anna and he noticed that the old man's
watery eyes turned in, as if gazing at images in his own thought. His
father's smile, as always, touched Dorn with an irritation, and he
hurried from it.

The others were more amusing. The spectacle of the faces wilting into
maudlin abstractions under the caress of the