Her feeling of fragility was so strong that she was startled by the appearance of a woman at her left, who walked in step with her. Sabina glanced at her profile and was comforted by her tallness, the assurance of her walk. She too was dressed in black, but walked without terror.

And then she vanished. The mirror had come to an end. Sabina had been confronted with herself, the life size image walking beside the shrunk inner self, proving to her once more the disproportion between her feelings and external truth.

As many other times Sabina had experienced smallness, a sense of gigantic dangers, but she faced in the mirror a tall, strong, mature woman of thirty, equal to her surroundings. In the mirror was the image of what she had become and the image she gave to the world, but her secret inner self could be overwhelmed by a large truck wheel.

It was always at this precise moment of diminished power that the image of her husband Alan appeared. It required a mood of weakness in her, some inner unbalance, some exaggeration in her fears, to summon the image of Alan. He appeared as a fixed point in space. A calm face. A calm bearing. A tallness which made him visible in crowds and which harmonized with her concept of his uniqueness. The image of Alan appeared in her vision like a snap-shot. It did not reach her through tactile memory or any of the senses but the eyes. She did not remember his touch, or his voice. He was a photograph in her mind, with the static pose which characterized him: either standing up above average tallness so that he must carry his head a little bent, and something calm which gave the impression of a kind of benediction. She could not see him playful, smiling, or reckless, or carefree. He would never speak first, assert his mood, likes or dislikes, but wait, as confessors do, to catch first of all the words or the moods of others. It gave him the passive quality of a listener, a reflector. She could not imagine him wanting anything badly (except that she should come home) or taking anything for himself. In the two snap-shots she carried he showed two facets but no contrasts: one listening and waiting, wise and detached, the other sitting in meditation as a spectator.

Whatever event (in this case the trivial one of the walk down 18th St.) caused in Sabina either a panic, a shrinking, these two images of Alan would appear, and her desire to return home.

She walked back to the room in which she had awakened that morning. She pulled her valise out from under the bed and began to pack it.