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376 kind of dignity coming into his own thoughts too. The notion of going off to Chicago or Milwaukee to walk through dirty streets hungering for the golden woman to come up to him out of the filth of life was quite gone now.

He sat at the table eating the food Katherine had prepared. Outside the house the sun was shining. It was only a little after two o'clock and the afternoon and evening were before him. It was strange how the Bible, the older Testaments, kept asserting themselves in his mind. He had never been much of a Bible reader. There was perhaps a kind of massive splendour to the prose of the book that now fell into step with his own thoughts. In that time, when men lived on the hills and on the plains with their flocks, life lasted in the body of a man or woman a long time. Men were spoken of who had lived for several hundred years. Perhaps there was more than one way to reckon the length of life. In his own case—if he could live every day as fully as he had been living this day life would be for him lengthened indefinitely.

Katherine came into the room bringing more food and a pot of tea and he looked up and smiled at her. Another thought came. "It would be an amazingly beautiful thing to have happen in the world if everyone, every living man, woman, and child, should suddenly, by a common impulse, come out of their houses, out of the factories and stores, come let us say into a great plain, where everyone could see everyone else, and if they should there and then, all of them, in the light of day, with everyone in the world knowing fully what everyone else in the world was doing, if they should all by one common impulse commit the most unforgivable sin of which they were conscious, what a great cleansing time that would be."

His mind made a kind of riot of pictures and he ate the food Katherine had set before him without thought of the physical act of eating. Katherine started to go out of the room and then, noting that he was unaware of her presence, stopped by the door leading into the kitchen and stood looking at him. He had never known that she had been aware of the struggle he had gone through for her many years before. Had he not made that struggle she would not have stayed on in the house. As a matter of fact, on that evening when he had declared that if she were to be made to leave he would leave also, the door to the bedroom up stairs was a little ajar and she was in the hallway down stairs. She had packed her few belongings and had them in a bundle and had intended to steal away some-