ng round at the old houses and wondering if I could hire a room
or so there, when a girl came down one of the staircases.

"Well, I didn't recognize her at first. I remember wondering why she
jumped back when she caught sight of me. 'Hullo!' I said, 'what are you
doing here?' 'I live here,' she said; and sure enough there was her name
on the wall, bracketed with another one: _Miss Gladys Sanders and Miss
Octavia Flagg_.

"'You!' I said. 'You live here?' She nodded and asked me if I would come
up. We went up the dusty old stairs to the top floor, and she took a
key from her purse and opened the door. I felt there was something
pretty brazen about all this. This wasn't the sort of thing to appeal to
Oakleigh Park, I was quite sure, and said so. 'Oh, I've done with
Oakleigh Park,' she said, 'and they've done with me.' And then her
friend, Miss Flagg, came in, a thin woman of about thirty-five, with a
green dress and rather untidy hair. I said thin, but so was Gladys. It
almost seemed to me, when I'd seen them a few times, that there was some
fierce fire inside of those women, wearing them thin and showing
through. Neither of them was beautiful; they didn't try to be. They just
lived for--what do you think? I'll tell you in a minute.

"At first I was all abroad at the sudden meeting. A minute before Gladys
came down that staircase, if you'd asked me whether I cared for her I'd
have said no; it was all burned up long ago. But now I'd seen her again,
thin and sallow and changed as she was, it had all come back with a
rush. Do you know that kind of love? It's because of the way it rushes
back on you, knocks you down and tramples on you, makes you feel mean
and degraded and ashamed, that I pray God it may never happen on me
again. I like to think a man may never have it but for one woman.
Sometimes, away out East, when I've been drowsing in a hammock listening
to the sweat dripping on the deck and watching the blue hills in the
distance, it has come upon me. Sometimes in dreams I've seen her face
clearer than I ever saw it in life.... You know them, perhaps?...
Dreams so vivid that one's brain and body ache with the pain of it? Ah!"

He paused and none offered to speak. I sat facing him in some
astonishment. There was to me something fundamentally shocking in a man
making such a confession. If it had been dark so that the words floated
to us invisibly; but in broad day! Perhaps more convincingly than
anything else did this i