He had no idea of reviving Loot. All desire to treat the New York spectacle was gone. The tale he saw shaping itself was simpler, nearer to his own experience. It was to be about a fellow like himself, about two or three people whose spiritual lives were as starved as his own had been. He sat for a long time penetrating his mind with the strange hard beauty created by that bit of crooked apple bough against a little square of sky. Such ordinary material to make magic out of—and that should be his theme. As he meditated, a thousand mysterious activities began to hum in him, his mind felt like that bit of rustling woodland above the cottage, so circumscribed yet so packed with the frail and complicated life of birds, insects, ferns, grasses, bursting buds, falling seeds, all the incessantly unfolding procession of the year. He had only to watch himself, to listen to himself, to try and set down the million glimmers and murmurs of the inner scene. "See here, Laura Lou," he cried out, pushing back his chair to go and tell her—and then remembered that nothing he could tell would be intelligible to her. He stood still, picturing the instant shock of thought if it had been Halo he had called, Halo who had hurried in from the kitchen… . He sat down at the desk and hid his face in his hands. "God," he thought. "When I was beginning to forget… ." He pulled his pen out, and wrote a few lines; then he was struck by Laura Lou's not having responded to his shout—she who always flew to him at the least pretext. A minute or two ago he had heard her busying herself with the preliminary assembling of food fragments which she called getting dinner. It was funny she hadn't answered; he thought he would go and see… .

She was in the kitchen, over the range. He thought he saw her push something into it—a white rag or paper, it seemed—and a moment later he caught the smoky acrid smell of burning linen. She turned with a face as white as the rag, and a smile which showed her teeth too much, as if her lips had shrunk away. "Yes … yes … coming … " she said nervously.

"Why, what's that queer smell? What are you burning?"

She gave the same death's-head smile. "I can't get the fire to draw—I just stuffed in anything… ."

"I should say you did. What a stench! I guess you've put it out now—"

She went and sat down on the chair by the kitchen table without making any answer.

"I don't see the joke," he grumbled, exasperated at being shaken out of his dream.