n. Life was too close, intimate. Nothing that could happen
in the apartment could in any way stir him. The things his wife might
say, her occasional half-hearted outbursts of passion, the goodness of
his stout mother-in-law who did the work of a servant without pay--

He sat in the apartment under the electric light pretending to read a
newspaper--thinking. He looked at his hands. They were large, shapeless,
a workingman's hands.

The figure of the girl from Iowa walked about the room. With her he went
out of the apartment and walked in silence through miles of streets. It
was not necessary to say words. He walked with her by a sea, along the
crest of a mountain. The night was clear and silent and the stars shone.
She also was a star. It was not necessary to say words.

Her eyes were like stars and her lips were like soft hills rising out of
dim, star-lit plains. "She is unattainable, she is far off like the
stars," he thought. "She is unattainable like the stars but unlike the
stars she breathes, she lives, like myself she has being."

One evening, some six weeks ago, the man who worked as foreman in the
bicycle factory killed his wife and he is now in the courts being tried
for murder. Every day the newspapers are filled with the story. On the
evening of the murder he had taken his wife as usual to a picture show
and they started home at nine. In Thirty-Second Street, at a corner near
their apartment building, the figure of a man darted suddenly out of an
alleyway and then darted back again. That incident may have put the
idea of killing his wife into the man's head.

They got to the entrance to the apartment building and stepped into a
dark hallway. Then quite suddenly and apparently without thought the man
took a knife out of his pocket. "Suppose that man who darted into the
alleyway had intended to kill us," he thought. Opening the knife he
whirled about and struck his wife. He struck twice, a dozen
times--madly. There was a scream and his wife's body fell.

The janitor had neglected to light the gas in the lower hallway.
Afterward, the foreman decided that was the reason he did it, that and
the fact that the dark slinking figure of a man darted out of an
alleyway and then darted back again. "Surely," he told himself, "I could
never have done it had the gas been lighted."

He stood in the hallway thinking. His wife was dead and with her had
died her unborn child. There was a sound of doors opening in the
apa