Now he had dismissed from his mind the other woman, his former wife, Mary Webster. He had thought when she went out of the bedroom she had finally walked off the stage. There had been satisfaction in seeing her go. He had really, in all their life together, never made a contact with her. When he thought her gone from the field of his own life he felt relieved. One could breathe more deeply, talk more freely.

He thought of her as having gone off the stage, but she had come back. He still had her to deal with too.

*

In Mary Webster's mind memories were awakening. Her husband was telling the story of his marriage, but she did not hear his words. A story began to tell itself within her, beginning far back on a day of her own young womanhood.

She had heard the cry of love for a man come out of her daughter's throat and the cry had stirred something within her so deeply that she had come back into the room where her husband and daughter sat together on the bed. Once there had been that same cry within another young woman, but for some reason it had never got itself out, past her lips. At the moment when it might have come from her, at that moment long ago when she lay naked on a bed and looked into the eyes of a young naked man something, a thing people called shame, had come between her and the getting of that glad cry past her lips.

Her mind now wearily went back over the details of the scene. An old railroad journey was retravelled.

Things were tangled. First she lived in one place and then, as though pushed into the act by a hand she could not see, she went on a visit to another place.

The journey there was taken in the middle of the night and, as there were no sleeping-cars on the train, she had to sit in a day-coach through several hours of darkness.

Outside the car window there was darkness, broken now and then when the train stopped for a few minutes at some town in Western Illinois or Southern Wisconsin. There was a station building with a lamp fastened to the outer wall and sometimes but a solitary man, bundled in a coat and perhaps pushing a truck piled with trunks and boxes along a station platform. At some of the towns people got aboard the train and at others people got off and went away into the darkness.

An old woman who carried a basket in which there was a black and white cat came to sit in the seat with her and after she had got off at one of the stations an old man took her place.

The old man did not look at her, but kept muttering words she could not catch. He had a ragged grey moustache that hung down over his shrunken lips and he continually stroked it with a bony old hand. The words he said in an undertone were muttered behind the hand.