Mildred
withdrew her hand, and left in mine the word of her own:

“Philip is murdered.”

I forced myself to say: “I will leave you, love. I cannot help you
now. You will want to be alone.”

She nodded and her eyes avoided mine. “It is terrible,” she spoke in a voice strangely casual and high. “Who
could have murdered Philip? Sweet, gentle Philip. Great Philip. I am
all dazed. We spoke of murder in his room, that day.”

“You spoke of murder?”

“Philip said to me: ‘You are the woman for whom man kills. I could kill
for you, Mildred.’”

“Dear, even the past is drawn into the dark design of an event that
sweeps us. Philip was rich----?”

“I know.” She did not like my reasoning. “I am dazed. I want to go to
bed ... and to sleep. Leave me, John.”

Still her eyes kept from my own. She had been glorious in my need of
her. Now shattered and distraught with the shadow on her fragrance, she
was almost ugly. Her arms were thin as she twisted her hands together
and her neck was long: and her eyes drooped heavy down. --Why is she ugly? I did not love her less. The ugliness I felt was a
pain added to the joy of loving her. And then, a dim sense came. It
was to grow ever less dim.--She is befouled with a thought! And that
thought is my own. She has been fair like a dawn with the dawn of my
love and now my thought clouds her. --Why is she dark? Because this murder will concern me!... So much I
knew an instant, and forgot. I left her. _e_

I am home. The lamp reveals my study, sharp: a changeling! White
curtains in the deep-set latticed windows, shelves of books, the couch
right angle to the open hearth, the low gray ceiling ... nothing is
moved yet everything is changed. A glow like fever hushes in the
shadow, the dull familiar things swell with vibrance into a dimension
new like an omen. I sit down, carefully folding my coat.--No wonder. What a shock! What a
night. I huddle in my dressing gown and greet the smoke of my pipe.--No
wonder. I take my book. --Better read. Above my shoulder, as I sit with the lamp close on the plain pine table
is a separate shelf: books on astrology. The book I hold is bound in
ivory parchment, cracked: the Gothic type stands bold on the soft
paper. I begin to read where only yesterday I placed my mark. Yesterday and
this page: to-day and this page again. How can such difference meet
upon a page? But why so whole a difference? What has happened? Your
parents--nothing definitive there. Nothing is lost there, surely. What
you anticipated was: what is anticipated, is. Make them understand. There is a way, if not to make them understand, at least to _make_
them.... This sense of an abysmal separateness in your eye trying to
link the words upon the page with words an eye of yours saw yesterday,
could not be born of what happened with your parents. Philip--what of
that? When he was a danger, you did not know of him: now that you know
of him, he is dead. The danger is dead. She did not yet love him. He
made claim upon her, my one rival claim: and life has withdrawn it for
me. A shock--she will need time--but she will recover! Did this murder
shake her whom he loved as much as me who never saw him? Why not be
glad then, if she be not too shaken? Do you want her prostrate? What
folly is this in your will? Are the gifts of event less welcome than
the gifts of nature? Aren’t you glad you have a body and a mind welcome
to Mildred? Don’t you accept whatever vantage they give you? Why not
accept the vantage of events? How can you help accept? John Mark, will
you be morbid, like other men, when the sun and moon of life shine full
on you?... Better read. --If there is something in all this, this strangeness in you: something
beside the tumult of your love, and the shock of learning how close
to your desire was another hand, hot and touching your own as you
reached--if there is something else, you’ll see it clearer in the
morning. Don’t push your clarity. Let it ripen. Dangerously close his
hand to your own? It is gone.... He may not be dead? ... a wound? No,
he is murdered. And that is forever. --Mildred is strangely dim. My memory and the note of my taut nerves
tell me best at this moment how I love her. I want to see her. I want
to have her vividly here. To corroborate what? I want to see again that
first time when I saw her....

       *       *       *       *       *

Evening, a dance. The electric lamps drive a stiff flood of light
through the gold-paneled room. No air--this atmosphere is a harsh
painted substance. Men and women are brittle or are cloying: their
spirit is dark as if no air had ever entered them. The music is a
weave of stuffs contorted, writhed, a hypocritical plea for gayety:
its sinuous lies move through the hall and through the bodies of the
dancers with a false laughter, with a macabre rhythm. Cynic music,
substitute in this world for breath; as are the lamps for light.... And
the coupled forms jerking slow in its rugose waves. Then, I see Mildred! I have met her before: casually, more than once. Now, for the first time, there is the grace in me to see her! She is air, open and coursing: she is sunlight. Her solidity is
resilient. She has a body which is a luminous smile, impervious and
ruthless. “What are you doing here?” I ask her. For her antithesis is so exact
... the velvety music, the slow whining bodies ... that she is clear
like a poem in a world of inarticulations. “Let’s talk,” she says. “It will be good for you to talk. Your mood is
so heavy.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Where else did you expect to find me?”

“I expected to find you nowhere.”

“Then you don’t know who I am.”

“You are Mildred Fayn. I have seen you: and I have heard of you.”

“Well, then? Did you not hear that I dance, that I motor, that I ride? Did you not hear that I flirt?”

“Whatever I heard and saw has naught to do with you.”

“You look, Doctor Mark, as if you had made a discovery. And you look
solemn.”

“I am pleased.”

“You are like a child, perhaps? Most solemn when most pleased?”

“Children have the gift of discovery--and of wonder.”

Suddenly she was serious. She had glanced dazzlingly around me. Now it
was as if she came straight forward. “I’ll dare be ‘serious’ with you,” she murmured. She looked full at me: her eyes had a crisp tenderness, like some
immortal fruit ever upon the Springlike verge of ripeness. I knew that
she understood, although the words perhaps were not within her mind,
how laughter is oblique: how seriousness is the full face of joy. We sat in a little bower cut off from the hall by palms. It became a
cool and fluid haven from the hall--from the hall’s synthetic sun. She was quiet. She folded her frail hands in her lap and raised her
head. A smile flickered at her mouth like a butterfly at a fruit. She
dispelled it. “It’s hard to sit serious,” she whispered. “It is so revealing.”

Again, instantly, she understood. “Yes: we don’t mind being naked when we are in motion. It must be that
motion covers us? The dance, the swim.