The room was dark, but twilight lingered in the old square, and home-going men and women were filing across it.  The babies and their nurses were gone now, there were only lounging men on the benches.  Lumbering green omnibuses rocked their way through the great stone arch, and toward the south, over the crowded foreign quarter, the pink of street lamps was beginning to battle with the warm purple and blue that still hung in the evening sky.  The season had been long delayed, but now there was a rustle of green against the network of boughs; a few warm days would bring the tulips and the fruit blossoms.

What a sweet, good, natural world it was in which to be happy!  With its wheeling motor cars, its lovers seated in high security for the long omnibus ride, its laborers pleasantly ready for the home table and the day’s domestic news!  The chattering little Jewish girls from one of the uptown department stores were gay with shrilly voiced plans; the driver, riding lazily home on a pile of empty bags, had no quarrel with the world; the smooth-haired, unhatted Italian women from the Ghetto, with shawls wrapped over their full breasts, and serene black-eyed babies toddling beside them, were placidly content with the run of their days.  It remained for the beautiful woman in the drawing-room to look with melancholy eyes upon the springtime, and tear out her heart in an agony no human power could cure.

“It all rests with Warren,” Rachael said.  Magsie was nothing, she was nothing; the world, the boys, were nothing.  It was for Warren to hold their destinies in his hands and decide for them all.  No use in raging, in reasoning, in arguing.  No use in setting forth the facts, the palpable right and wrong.  No use in bitterly asking the unanswering heavens if this were right and just, this system that could allow any young girl to feel any married man, any father, her natural prey.  She had come to love Warren just as in a few years she might come to love someone else.  That was all permissible; regrettable perhaps for Warren’s wife, an unmistakable calamity for Warren’s boys, but, from Magsie’s standpoint, comprehensible and acceptable.  If Warren were free, Magsie was well within her rights; if he were not, Rachael was the last woman in the world to dispute it.

After a while Rachael began to move mechanically about the room.  She sat down at her desk and wrote a few checks; the boys little first dancing lessons must be paid for, the man who mended the clock, the woman who had put all her linen in order.  She wrote briskly, reaching quickly for envelopes and stamps, and, when she had finished, closed the desk with her usual neatness.  She telephoned the kitchen; had she told Louise that Doctor Gregory might come home at midnight?  He might be at home for breakfast.  Then she glanced about the quiet room, and went softly out, through the inner door, to her own bedroom adjoining.  She walked on little usual errands between bureau and wardrobe, steadily proceeding with the changing of her gown.  Once she stopped short, in the centre of the floor, and stood musing for a few silent minutes, then she said, aloud and lightly: