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 public bar. This is the quiet end. I’m on one side of you and Father Ryan is on the other. The bathroom is opposite us. So long.”

Bob’s parting smile was meant to be heartening. He was always forgetting that sympathy was wasted on a person who persisted in regarding everything that happened, whether good or bad, as some kind of adventure.

Valerie opened her door and carried her hand-bag inside. She threw her hat on the bed, dropped into the one plain chair, wiped her face, and began a survey of the possible horrors. She saw that the room was fairly clean, that the clothes cupboard would do, that there were two pillows to the single bed, an unusually generous equipment, that the quilt was aggressively white, that the tops of the chest of drawers and the washstand were not stained as badly as many she had met before, that the pattern on the one mat had faded to a less irritating result than newness would have been, and that the wall paper did not have the one sickly greenish-yellow tone she could not possibly have endured. The worst being thus satisfactorily absent she heaved a sigh of relief. There were flies, but she had had flies before, and most of them would go with the heat. She was no victim of optimism, but when she was using a present as a means to a future it was the future and not the present that conquered her senses and her imagination.

She walked to the window swishing out the flies. She was glad to see that it opened on the balcony and she hoped that she would have it mostly to herself. She looked across the river, and could just make out the rush-fringed edge of a large swamp. She turned back and smiled into the spotted mirror that hung above the chest of drawers.

“Well,” she thought, “we begin again.”