“Why, sometimes I do,” she answered in a matter-of-fact tone.  “But I just had a telegram from my husband saying that he is able to get home a little sooner than he thought, and will be here early tomorrow morning.  And the children voted to go to bed early so they could be up bright and early to see him.”

Vincent continued looking down on her blankly for an instant, after she had finished this reasonable explanation.  He was startled by the wave of anger which spurted up over him like flame.

He heard Mr. Welles make some suitable comment, “How nice.”  He himself said, “Oh really,” in a neutral tone, and turned away.

* * * * *

For a moment he saw nothing of what was before him, and then realized that he had moved next to Frank Warner, who was standing by Nelly Powers, and asking her to dance with him again.  She was shaking her head, and looking about the room uneasily.  Vincent felt a gust of anger again.  “Oh, go to it, Frank!” he said, in a low fierce tone.  “Take her out again, as often as you like.  Why shouldn’t you?”

Nelly gave him one of her enigmatic looks, deep and inscrutable, shrugged her shoulders, put her hand on Frank’s arm, and walked off with him.

“They’re the handsomest couple in the room,” said Vincent, at random to a farmer near him, who looked at him astonished by the heat of his accent.  And then, seeing that Nelly’s husband was in possible earshot, Vincent raised his voice recklessly.  “They’re the handsomest couple in the room,” he repeated resentfully.  “They ought always to dance together.”

If ’Gene heard, he did not show it, the granite impassivity of his harsh face unmoved.

Vincent went on towards the door, his nerves a little relieved by this outburst.  He would go out and have another cigarette, he thought, and then take his old man-child home to bed.  What were they doing in this absurd place?

The music began to skirl again as he stepped out and closed the door behind him.

He drew in deeply the fresh night-air, and looking upward saw that the clouds had broken away and that the stars were out, innumerable, thick-sown, studding with gold the narrow roof of sky which, rising from the mountains on either side, arched itself over the valley.  He stood staring before him, frowning, forgetting what he had come out to do.  He told himself that coming from that yelling confusion inside, and the glare of those garish lamps, he was stupefied by the great silence of the night.  There was nothing clear in his mind, only a turmoil of eddying sensations which he could not name.  He walked down to the huge dark pine, the pine which ’Gene Powers loved like a person, and which his wife wished were cut down.  What a ghastly prison marriage was, he thought, a thing as hostile to the free human spirit as an iron ball-and-chain.

He looked back at the little house, tiny as an insect before the great bulk of the mountains, dwarfed by the gigantic tree, ridiculous, despicable in the face of Nature, like the human life it sheltered.  From its every window poured a flood of yellow light that was drunk up in a twinkling by the vastness of the night’s obscurity.