n the night to terrorize
her. He had awakened and understood, and had comforted her with his
love, lavishing upon her tender, passionate assurance of how he was
going to get strong and make it all come right for them both. There was
something terrible in that passion for one another that came out of the
consciousness of all else lost. They had each other--there were moments
when that burned with a terrible flame through the feeling that they had
nothing else. That night they went to sleep in a wonderful consciousness
of being alone together in the world. Time after time that swept them
together with an intensity of which finally they came to be afraid. They
stopped speaking of it; it came to seem a thing not to dwell upon.

The thought of Edith's letter had brought some of that back now. She
turned from it to the things she was passing, houses she recognized, new
houses. Walking on past them she thought of how those homes joined. With
most of them there were no fences between--one yard merging into
another. Children were running from yard to yard; here a woman was
standing in her own yard calling to a woman in the house adjoining. She
passed a porch where four women were sitting sewing; another where two
women were playing with a baby. There were so many meeting places for
their lives; they were not shut in with their own feeling. That feeling
which they as individuals knew reached out into common experiences, into
a life in common growing out of individual things. Passing these houses,
she wanted to share in that life in common. She had been too long by
herself. She needed to be one with others. Life, for a time, had a
certain terrible beauty that burned in that sense of isolation. But it
was not the way. One needed to be one with others.

She thought of how it was love, more than any other thing, that gave
these people that common life. Love was the fabric of it. Love made new
combinations of people--homes, children. The very thing in her that had
shut her out was the thing drawing them into that oneness, that many in
one. Homes were closed to her because of that very impulse out of which
homes were built.

She had, without any plan for doing so, turned down the little street
where she used to go to meet Stuart. And when she realized where she was
going thoughts of other things fell away; the feeling of those first
days was strangely revivified, as if going that old way made her for the
moment the girl who had gone