It was Zora who talked, with her eyes upon her sewing and unsewing. "Rango is a changed man, and I'm so happy, Djuna. He is kinder to me. He was very unhappy before and he took it out on me. A man cannot live without love and Rango was not easy to satisfy. All the women wanted him, but he would see them once perhaps and come back dejected, and refuse to see them again. He always found something wrong with them. With you he is content. And I am happy because I knew this had to happen sometime, but I'm happy it's you because I trust you. I used to fear some woman coming and taking him where I would never see him again. And I know you wouldn't do that."

Djuna thought: "I love Rango so much that I want to share his burdens, love and serve what he loves and serves, share his conviction that Zora is an innocent victim of life, worthy of all sacrifices."

This was for both Rango and Djuna the atonement for the marvelous hours in the barge. All great flights away from life land one in such places of atonement as this room, with Zora sewing rags and talking about dandruff, about ovarian insufficiency, about gastritis, about thyroid and neuritis.

Djuna had brought her a colorful Indian-print dress and Zora had dyed it black. And now she was reshaping it and it looked worn and dismal already. She wore a shawl pinned with a brooch which had once held stones in its clasps and was now empty, thrusting bare silver branches out like the very symbol of denudation. She wore two overcoats sewn together, the inner one showing at the edges.

While they sat sewing together, Zora lamented over Rango: "Why must he always live with so many people around him?"

Knowing that Rango liked to spend hours and hours alone with her, Djuna feared to say: "Perhaps he is just seeking warmth and forgetfulness, running away from illness and darkness."

When Rango was with her he seemed dominating, full of dignity and pride. When he entered Zora's room he seemed to shrink. When he first entered there was a copper glow in his face; after a moment the glow vanished.

"Why do men live in shoals?" persisted Zora.

Djuna looked at Rango lighting the fire, warming water, starting to cook. There was something so discouraged in the pose of his body, expressing agreement with Zora's enumeration of his faults, so diminished, which Djuna could not bear to witness.

Zora was in the hospital.

Djuna was cooking for Rango now, and also a special soup which Rango was to take to Zora at noon.

As Djuna passed through the various rooms to find Zora she saw a woman sitting up in bed combing her hair and tying a blue ribbon around it. Her face was utterly wasted, and yet she had powdered it, and rouged her lips, and there was on it not only the smile of a woman dying but also the smile of a woman who wanted to die with grace, deploying her last flare of feminine coquetry for her interview with death.