, the hour or two of oblivion that lay back of her
was like a wall between her soul and the worst phase of her suffering.
In answer to her cry for help, perhaps an appeal to the best in her own
nature, there had come a cessation of what was to her the only
unbearable pain--the bitter, blaming anger which had flared up in her,
answering her husband's anger like the reflection of a torch in a
mirror. In that silent hour before dawn, she had seen Paul suddenly as a
victim to forces outside himself quite as much as she was; poor, tired
Paul, with his haggard face, flushed with a wrath that was not his own,
but an involuntary expression of suffering, the scream of a man caught
in the cogs of a great machine. She hung before her mental vision now,
constantly, the picture of Paul as she had seen him when she came
downstairs; Paul leaning his chin on his hands, his jaded face white and
drawn under his thinning, graying hair.

The alleviation which came through this conception of her husband was
tempered by the final disappearance of her old feeling that Paul was
stronger, clearer-headed, than she, and that if she could but once make
him stop and understand the forces in their life which she feared, he
could conquer them as easily as he conquered obstacles in the way of
their material success. She now felt that he was not even as strong as
she, since he could not get even her faint glimpse of their common
enemy, this Minotaur of futile materialism which had devoured the young
years of their marriage and was now threatening to destroy the
possibility of a great, strongly-rooted affection which had lain so
clearly before them. She felt staggered by the responsibility of having
to be strong enough for two; and as another day wore on this new
preoccupation became almost as absorbing an obsession as her anger of
the night before.

But this was steadying in the very velocity with which her mind swept
around the circle of possible courses of action. Her thoughts hummed
with a steady, dizzy speed around and around the central idea that
something must be done and that she was now the only one to do it.
'Stashie thought to herself that she had never seen Mrs. Hollister look
so well, her eyes were so bright, her cheeks so pink.

Lydia had set herself the task of getting down and sorting the curtains
in the house, preparatory to sending them to the cleaner. Above the
piles of dingy drapery, her face shone, as 'Stashie had noted, with a
s