“How on earth can I go on living here?” he wondered.

A careless servant had left the outer shutters open, and the sun was beating on the window-panes.  Ralph pushed open the windows, shut the shutters, and wandered toward his arm-chair.  Beads of perspiration stood on his forehead:  the temperature of the room reminded him of the heat under the ilexes of the Sienese villa where he and Undine had sat through a long July afternoon.  He saw her before him, leaning against the tree-trunk in her white dress, limpid and inscrutable....  “We were made one at Opake, Nebraska....”  Had she been thinking of it that afternoon at Siena, he wondered?  Did she ever think of it at all?...  It was she who had asked Moffatt to dine.  She had said:  “Father brought him home one day at Apex....  I don’t remember ever having seen him since”—­and the man she spoke of had had her in his arms ... and perhaps it was really all she remembered!

She had lied to him—­lied to him from the first ... there hadn’t been a moment when she hadn’t lied to him, deliberately, ingeniously and inventively.  As he thought of it, there came to him, for the first time in months, that overwhelming sense of her physical nearness which had once so haunted and tortured him.  Her freshness, her fragrance, the luminous haze of her youth, filled the room with a mocking glory; and he dropped his head on his hands to shut it out....

The vision was swept away by another wave of hurrying thoughts.  He felt it was intensely important that he should keep the thread of every one of them, that they all represented things to be said or done, or guarded against; and his mind, with the unwondering versatility and tireless haste of the dreamer’s brain, seemed to be pursuing them all simultaneously.  Then they became as unreal and meaningless as the red specks dancing behind the lids against which he had pressed his fists clenched, and he had the feeling that if he opened his eyes they would vanish, and the familiar daylight look in on him....

A knock disturbed him.  The old parlour-maid who was always left in charge of the house had come up to ask if he wasn’t well, and if there was anything she could do for him.  He told her no ... he was perfectly well ... or, rather, no, he wasn’t ... he supposed it must be the heat; and he began to scold her for having forgotten to close the shutters.

It wasn’t her fault, it appeared, but Eliza’s:  her tone implied that he knew what one had to expect of Eliza ... and wouldn’t he go down to the nice cool shady dining-room, and let her make him an iced drink and a few sandwiches?

“I’ve always told Mrs. Marvell I couldn’t turn my back for a second but what Eliza’d find a way to make trouble,” the old woman continued, evidently glad of the chance to air a perennial grievance.  “It’s not only the things she forgets to do,” she added significantly; and it dawned on Ralph that she was making an appeal to him, expecting him to take sides with her in the chronic conflict between herself and Eliza.  He said to himself that perhaps she was right ... that perhaps there was something he ought to do ... that his mother was old, and didn’t always see things; and for a while his mind revolved this problem with feverish intensity....