roof. November found him back in the office again, in
fairly good health, with an outer skin of indifference slowly forming
over his lacerated soul. There had been a hard minute to live through
when he came back to his old brown room in Washington Square. The walls
and tables were covered with photographs of Undine: effigies of all
shapes and sizes, expressing every possible sentiment dear to the
photographic tradition. Ralph had gathered them all up when he had moved
from West End Avenue after Undine's departure for Europe, and they
throned over his other possessions as her image had throned over his
future the night he had sat in that very room and dreamed of soaring up
with her into the blue...

It was impossible to go on living with her photographs about him; and
one evening, going up to his room after dinner, he began to unhang them
from the walls, and to gather them up from book-shelves and mantel-piece
and tables. Then he looked about for some place in which to hide them.
There were drawers under his book-cases; but they were full of old
discarded things, and even if he emptied the drawers, the photographs,
in their heavy frames, were almost all too large to fit into them. He
turned next to the top shelf of his cupboard; but here the nurse had
stored Paul's old toys, his sand-pails, shovels and croquet-box. Every
corner was packed with the vain impedimenta of living, and the mere
thought of clearing a space in the chaos was too great an effort.

He began to replace the pictures one by one; and the last was still in
his hand when he heard his sister's voice outside. He hurriedly put
the portrait back in its usual place on his writing-table, and Mrs.
Fairford, who had been dining in Washington Square, and had come up to
bid him good night, flung her arms about him in a quick embrace and went
down to her carriage.

The next afternoon, when he came home from the office, he did not at
first see any change in his room; but when he had lit his pipe and
thrown himself into his arm-chair he noticed that the photograph of his
wife's picture by Popple no longer faced him from the mantel-piece. He
turned to his writing-table, but her image had vanished from there too;
then his eye, making the circuit of the walls, perceived that they also
had been stripped. Not a single photograph of Undine was left; yet so
adroitly had the work of elimination been done, so ingeniously the
remaining objects readjusted, that the change att