"And so I stood there stammering and he was looking at me with a puzzled startled look in his eyes. The house was very quiet and I remember how the light of the lamp, in its bracket on the wall, fell on our two naked bodies. My friend, the man who was the witness of that moment of vital drama in my life, is dead now. He died some eight years ago and your mother and I dressed ourselves in our best clothes and went in a carriage to his funeral and later to a graveyard to watch his body being put away into the ground, but at that moment he was very much alive and I shall always continue to think of him as he was then. We had been tramping about all day in the fields and he, like myself, had just come, you remember, from the bath. His young body was very slender and strong and it made a glowing white mark against the dark wall of the hallway, against which he stood.

"Were we both expecting something more to happen, waiting for something more to happen? We did not speak to each other again, but stood in silence. Perhaps he was only startled by my statement of what I had just done and by something a little strange in the way I had told him. Ordinarily after such an incident there would have been a kind of giggling confusion, the thing would have been passed off as a kind of secret and delicious joke, but I had killed all possibility of its being taken that way by something in the way I had looked and acted when I came out to him. I was, I suppose, at the same time both too conscious and not conscious enough of the significance of what I had done.

"And so we just stood in silence looking at each other and then the door downstairs, that led to the street, opened and his mother and sister came into the house. They had taken advantage of the fact that their guest had gone to sleep and had walked to the business part of town to do some shopping.

"As for myself. What was going on within me at that moment is the hardest thing of all to explain. I had difficulty getting hold of myself, of that you may be sure. What I think now, at this moment, is that then, at that moment long ago when I stood there naked in that hallway beside my friend, something had gone out of me that I could not immediately get back.

"Perhaps when you have grown older you will understand as you cannot understand now."

John Webster looked long and hard at his daughter who also looked at him. For both of them the story he was telling had become a rather impersonal one. The woman, who was so closely connected to them both as wife and mother, had gone quite out of the tale as she had but a few moments before gone stumbling out of the room.