It was really too dark to see, but Julia Phillips stayed on in the dilapidated old garden, cutting down the phlox, tying up the chrysanthemums (why had they grown so very tall and floppy?). She stopped every now and then to look up from the shadowy garden to the extraordinarily luminous lavender sky overhead, where already the moon was brightening, white gold over the deep red gold of the maple leaves. Has the light in October always been like this? she asked herself. She did not remember an autumn of such radiant skies, an autumn of such pure gold, and she lifted her head to drink in the amplitude of it. How dark the house looked, how dark now the garden. It really was time to go in and light the lamps, for Damon would soon be home.

Still she lingered on, feeling about for her tools in the dark, smelling the bitter sharp smell of the earth and the leaves, not wanting to break this quiet mood. There, working for long hours till her back and legs ached, she felt sane, she recaptured some deep rhythm which these hectic days destroyed. She was a large Junoesque woman who had been a beauty and still had the carriage and air of a beauty, a deceptive surface calm which concealed strong feelings and which had made her the kind of woman people lean on and expect comfort from. She had long ago grown used to giving to life what was expected; the revolt—and there was revolt—was buried very deep. No one guessed what her life with Damon had been, that the other side of his enormous gusto and love of life was an abyss of self-distrust. She had lifted him again and again, patiently, quietly, and with what she imagined was love, but it had seemed to her for some time now that she was acting a part, the part of the perfect wife. Lately she had felt a wild desire, to escape, to run away, to find out at long last what she herself was like, to live her own life, though she was very vague as to what this might be.

She felt that this autumn, so outwardly calm, was moving toward some crisis, a crisis which she would not have the power to avert. And now since that fatal afternoon at the Civil Liberties (was it only three days ago?) Damon was in his very worst state. She stayed in the garden because she dreaded going in to light the lamps, to put away her natural self, which at the moment longed for a deep sleep, longed like a hibernating animal to hide away somewhere and no longer have to respond. She stayed in the garden, in the dark, as in some kind limbo, gathering her courage.