Now John Webster stood in the hallway of his house looking at the woman who had been the cause of the quarrel long ago. Well, he had seen her going silently about the house almost every day during the long years since that thing happened, but he had not looked at her as he did now. When she grew older Natalie Swartz might look as this woman now looked. If he were to be a fool and run away with Natalie, as that young fellow from Indianapolis had once run away with this woman, and if it fell out there was no railroad wreck he might some day be living with a woman who looked somewhat as Katherine now looked.

The thought did not alarm him. It was on the whole rather a sweet thought. "She has lived and sinned and suffered," he thought. There was about the woman's person a kind of strong quiet dignity and it was reflected in her physical being. There was no doubt a kind of dignity coming into his own thoughts too. The notion of going off to Chicago or Milwaukee to walk through dirty streets hungering for the golden woman to come up to him out of the filth of life was quite gone now.

He sat at the table eating the food Katherine had prepared. Outside the house the sun was shining. It was only a little after two o'clock and the afternoon and evening were before him. It was strange how the Bible, the older Testaments, kept asserting themselves in his mind. He had never been much of a Bible reader. There was perhaps a kind of massive splendour to the prose of the book that now fell into step with his own thoughts. In that time, when men lived on the hills and on the plains with their flocks, life lasted in the body of a man or woman a long time. Men were spoken of who had lived for several hundred years. Perhaps there was more than one way to reckon the length of life. In his own case if he could live every day as fully as he had been living this day life would be for him lengthened indefinitely.

Katherine came into the room bringing more food and a pot of tea and he looked up and smiled at her. Another thought came. "It would be an amazingly beautiful thing to have happen in the world if everyone, every living man, woman, and child, should suddenly, by a common impulse, come out of their houses, out of the factories and stores, come let us say into a great plain, where everyone could see everyone else, and if they should there and then, all of them, in the light of day, with everyone in the world knowing fully what everyone else in the world was doing, if they should all by one common impulse commit the most unforgivable sin of which they were conscious, what a great cleansing time that would be."