The tears were an affront now that she was all eyes, needed above all to see. She forced them back, rubbed her face harshly with a handkerchief. Then she sat down in an armchair by the empty hearth. Sun poured in through the long windows on the velvet curtains faded to amber, not a diffused light but a long wide beam in which motes of dust danced, and which fell on the bookcases and lit up a long row of Henry James’s novels in dark-blue bindings. Just in front of her over the mantel was a painting of Southern France—or perhaps New Mexico she thought as she looked at it—a small orchard through which one saw the outlines of a bare brown hill rising, but all this set low on the canvas so that what gave the painting its quality was the wide expanse of sky, the spaces it managed to suggest. On a low table beside her a copy of the New Republic carried an ugly black headline “The Un-American Dream.” She turned it over. It seemed, at the moment, irrelevant. For what caught her now after the first rush of emotion, was the extraordinary quiet aliveness of the room. She picked up the ash tray beside her, inlaid enamel, bright blue and white, and turned it over. This Edward must have brought back from the Balkans two summers before. Perhaps someone had given it to him—he loved little presents, presents that meant places and people. She recognized over the bookcase a Picasso pen-and-ink drawing which he had bought while still in college—and the awful row there was when their father found what it had cost. But that Chinese horse—that she had not seen before. She was feeling her way slowly into the room, into its life. It was not what she had expected—what had she expected? Some sign of violent disturbance, of breakdown? It was almost suspiciously calming here. A man did not walk out of a room like this to commit suicide. Whatever tore Edward to pieces was somewhere else, and so it seemed almost that he was not here, that what she had feared, the confrontation, would not take place. And it was too still, a stillness through which the roar of a car going up the hill in second broke with ugly harsh insistence, bringing her to her feet.