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WO things impressed Storrow as he let himself into the studio with his own latch-key. One was the quietness and gloom of the building, after the stark sunlight and noise of the open street. The other was his personal reaction to this new environ- ment, prompting him to move almost stealthily. It made him think of the big moment of suspense in a melodrama, with the stage expectantly darkened and that anticipa- tional hush which precedes a dramatic outburst.

Yet he found, as he quietly closed the door behind him, that no big moment awaited him. Torrie lay asleep on the bed, with her back to him. The curtain by an opened window was blowing lazily in the breeze. A litter of lingerie cascaded over a chair-back. A faint drone of steam came from one of the radiators.

Storrow looked back at the bed. The curve of his wife's back reminded him of the back of a sleeping kitten. He searched the lines of that relaxed figure for some appeasing ugliness, for something to start into motion the sullen machinery of indignation. But he stood slightly bewildered, slightly disheartened, by the aspect of innocence which she could still wear in her slumber. About the soft line of the neck, below the heavy cloud of the tumbled hair, was a disturbing air of delicacy. What he could see of her face seemed perversely child- like, with its smooth milkiness of skin. And even the fact that she could sleep so soundly, so abandonedly, that she could lie so passive and unresisting before his eyes, seemed to blunt the edge of all his earlier determinations.

He knew he would have to wait. 260