way.

Sally spoke again. Her voice sounded small and far off, an odd flatness
in it.

"Married?"

Ginger threw his cigarette out of the window. He was shocked to find
that he was smoking. Nothing could have been farther from his intention
than to smoke. He nodded.

"Whom has he married?"

Ginger coughed. Something was sticking in his throat, and speech was
difficult.

"A girl called Doland."

"Oh, Elsa Doland?"

"Yes."

"Elsa Doland." Sally drummed with her fingers on the arm of the chair.
"Oh, Elsa Doland?"

There was silence again. The little clock ticked fussily on the
mantelpiece. Out in the street automobile horns were blowing. From
somewhere in the distance came faintly the rumble of an elevated train.
Familiar sounds, but they came to Sally now with a curious, unreal sense
of novelty. She felt as though she had been projected into another world
where everything was new and strange and horrible--everything except
Ginger. About him, in the mere sight of him, there was something known
and heartening.

Suddenly, she became aware that she was feeling that Ginger was behaving
extremely well. She seemed to have been taken out of herself and to be
regarding the scene from outside, regarding it coolly and critically;
and it was plain to her that Ginger, in this upheaval of all things, was
bearing himself perfectly. He had attempted no banal words of sympathy.
He had said nothing and he was not looking at her. And Sally felt that
sympathy just now would be torture, and that she could not have borne to
be looked at.

Ginger was wonderful. In that curious, detached spirit that had come
upon her, she examined him impartially, and gratitude welled up from the
very depths of her. There he sat, saying nothing and doing nothing, as
if he knew that all she needed, the only thing that could keep her sane
in this world of nightmare, was the sight of that dear, flaming head
of his that made her feel that the world had not slipped away from her
altogether.

Ginger did not move. The room had grown almost dark now. A spear of
light from a street lamp shone in through the window.

Sally got up abruptly. Slowly, gradually, inch by inch, the great
suffocating cloud which had been crushing her had lifted. She felt alive
again. Her black hour had gone, and she was back in the world of
living things once more. She was afire with a fierce, tearing pain that
tormented her almost beyond endurance, but dimly she sensed the fa