ments that used to drape the chair by
his bed. Then he would remember and sink back while a great wave of
depression swept over him. Nothing to get up for. Store clothes on the
chair by the bed. He was taking it easy.

Back home on the farm in southern Illinois he had known the hour the
instant his eyes opened. Here the flat next door was so close that the
bedroom was in twilight even at midday. On the farm he could tell by the
feeling--an intangible thing, but infallible. He could gauge the very
quality of the blackness that comes just before dawn. The crowing of the
cocks, the stamping of the cattle, the twittering of the birds in the
old elm whose branches were etched eerily against his window in the
ghostly light--these things he had never needed. He had known. But here,
in the unsylvan section of Chicago which bears the bosky name of
Englewood, the very darkness had a strange quality. A hundred unfamiliar
noises misled him. There were no cocks, no cattle, no elm. Above all,
there was no instinctive feeling. Once, when they first came to the
city, he had risen at twelve-thirty, thinking it was morning, and had
gone clumping about the flat waking up everyone and loosing from his
wife's lips a stream of acid vituperation that seared even his
case-hardened sensibilities. The people sleeping in the bedroom of the
flat next door must have heard her.

"You big rube! Getting up in the middle of the night and stomping around
like cattle. You'd better build a shed in the backyard and sleep there
if you're so dumb you can't tell night from day."

Even after thirty-three years of marriage he had never ceased to be
appalled at the coarseness of her mind and speech--she who had seemed so
mild and fragile and exquisite when he married her. He had crept back to
bed, shamefacedly. He could hear the couple in the bedroom of the flat
just across the little court grumbling and then laughing a little,
grudgingly, and yet with appreciation. That bedroom, too, had still the
power to appall him. Its nearness, its forced intimacy, were daily
shocks to him whose most immediate neighbour, back on the farm, had been
a quarter of a mile away. The sound of a shoe dropped on the hardwood
floor, the rush of water in the bathroom, the murmur of nocturnal
confidences, the fretful cry of a child in the night, all startled and
distressed him whose ear had found music in the roar of the thresher and
had been soothed by the rattle of the tractor and