As for the two remaining women, one of them wanted to speak of the thing seen while the other did not. There were several ineffectual attempts at talk of the matter on the part of the older of the two and then they also parted. The youngest of the three women, the one who had smiled at John Webster that morning when he had just come out of Natalie's presence and when he had for the first time realized that the doors of her being were open for him, went along the street past the door of the bookseller's shop and up a climbing street into the lighted business section of the town. She kept smiling as she went along and it was because of something she herself did not understand.

It was because she was herself one in whom the little voices talked and now they were going busily. Some phrase, picked up somewhere, from the Bible perhaps when she was a young girl and went to Sunday school, or from some book, kept saying itself over and over in her mind. What a charming combination of plain words in everyday use among people. She kept saying them in her mind and after a time, when she came to a place in the street where there was no one near, she said them aloud. "And as it turned out there was a marriage in our house," were the words she said.

Book Two

I

As you will remember, the room in which John Webster slept was at a corner of the house, upstairs. From one of his two windows he looked out into the garden of a German who owned a store in his town, but whose real interest in life was the garden. All through the year he worked at it and had John Webster been more alive, during the years he lived in the room, he might have got keen pleasure out of looking down upon his neighbour at work. In the early morning and late afternoon he was always to be seen, smoking his pipe and digging, and a great variety of smells came floating up and in at the window of the room above, the sour acid smell of vegetables decaying, the rich heady smell of stable manure and then, all through the summer and late into the fall, the fragrant smell of roses and the marching procession of the flowers of the seasons.

John Webster had lived in his room for many years without much thought of what a room, within which a man lives and the walls of which enclose him like a garment when he sleeps, might be like. It was a square room with one window looking down into the German's garden and another window that faced the blank walls of the German's house. There were three doors, one leading into a hallway, one into the room where his wife slept, and a third that led into his daughter's room.

One came into the place at night and closed the doors and prepared oneself for sleep. Behind the two walls were the two other people, also preparing for sleep, and behind the walls of the German's house no doubt the same thing was going on. The German had two daughters and a son. They would be going to bed or were already in bed. There was, at that street end, something like a little village of people going to bed or already in bed.