bing." All this came from the letting down
of conversational bars, the confounded books he found about on tables.
Words, like everything else, had lost their meanings. In his day a bad
woman was bad, a good, likewise, good; but the Lord couldn't tell them
apart now. It was the dancing, too. Might as well be married to a man,
he thought.

Mariana was haggard, the paint on her face crudely--paint. He saw that
there were tears in her eyes, and he turned away confused, rose. The
slot in his cigarette box refused to open, and he shook it violently,
then put it back with a clatter. "Tell Rudolph you're here," he said
disjointedly; and, miserable, left the room. Dressing he stood at a
window; the west held a narrow strip of crimson light under a windy mass
of cloud. The ruin of Shadrach Furnace was sombre. Within, the room was
almost bare. There was a large, high-posted bed without drapings, a
vermilion lacquered table, dark with age, supporting a glass lamp at its
side; a set of drawers with old brass handles; a pair of stiff Adam
chairs with wheel backs; and a modern mahogany dressing case, variously
and conveniently divided, a clear mirror in the door.

The day failed rapidly, and he lit a pair of small lamps on the set of
drawers. The sun sank in no time at all. Mariana, crying. The girl ought
to go to her mother, and not come out to him, an old man, with her
intimate troubles. "A name I never repeat," Charlotte had said. That was
just like her. Small sympathy there, and no more understanding. He
knotted his tie hurriedly, askew; and gathered the ends once more. It
tired him a little to dress in the evening; often he longed to stay
relaxed, pondering, until Rudolph called him to dinner. But every day
something automatic, tyrannical, dragged him up to his room, encased him
in rigid linen, formal black. Mariana, against the fireplace, ate
listlessly; and, later, he beat her with shameful ease at sniff.

"You can't do that," he pointed out with asperity, when she
thoughtlessly joined unequal numbers. "Why not?" she asked. She must be
addled. "It's against the rule." Mariana said, "I'm tired of rules."
She always had put away the dominoes, but to-night she ignored them, and
he returned the pieces to their morocco case. She relapsed into silence
and a chair; and he sat with gaze fixed on the hickory in the fireplace,
burning to impalpable, white ash.

What a procession of logs had been there reduced to dust, warming
generat