to light the candles. Peter stopped her.

"Can't we have the firelight for a little while? You are always
beautiful, but--you are lovely in the firelight, Harmony."

"That is because you like me. We always think our friends are
beautiful."

"I am fond of Anna, but I have never thought her beautiful."

The kitchen was small. Harmony, rolling up her sleeves by the table,
and Peter before the stove were very close together. The dusk was fast
fading into darkness; to this tiny room at the back of the old house few
street sounds penetrated. Round them, shutting them off together from
the world of shops with lighted windows, rumbling busses and hurrying
humanity, lay the old lodge with its dingy gardens, its whitewashed
halls, its dark and twisting staircases.

Peter had been very careful. He had cultivated a comradely manner with
the girl that had kept her entirely at her ease with him. But it had
been growing increasingly hard. He was only human after all. And he was
very comfortable. Love, healthy human love, thrives on physical ease.
Indigestion is a greater foe to it than poverty. Great love songs are
written, not by poets starving in hall bedrooms, with insistent hunger
gnawing and undermining all that is of the spirit, but by full-fed
gentlemen who sing out of an overflowing of content and wide fellowship,
and who write, no doubt, just after dinner. Love, being a hunger, does
not thrive on hunger.

Thus Peter. He had never found women essential, being occupied in the
struggle for other essentials. Women had had little part in his busy
life. Once or twice he had seen visions, dreamed dreams, to waken
himself savagely to the fact that not for many years could he afford the
luxury of tender eyes looking up into his, of soft arms about his neck.
So he had kept away from women with almost ferocious determination. And
now!

He drew a chair before the stove and sat down. Standing or sitting, he
was much too large for the kitchen. He sat in the chair, with his hands
hanging, fingers interlaced between his knees.

The firelight glowed over his strong, rather irregular features.
Harmony, knife poised over the evening's potatoes, looked at him.

"I think you are sad to-night, Peter."

"Depressed a bit. That's all."

"It isn't money again?"

It was generally money with any of the three, and only the week before
Peter had found an error in his bank balance which meant that he was a
hundred Kronen or so poorer than h