The woman who had been his wife, all people for that matter, spent their entire lives sinking themselves deeper and deeper into that sea. If one wanted to let oneself get more and more fancy about the matter, indulge in a kind of drunken debauch of fancy, as it were, one could in a half playful mood jump over some invisible line and say that the sea of silence into which people were always so intent on sinking themselves was in reality death. There was a race towards the goal of death between the mind and body and almost always the mind arrived first.

The race began in childhood and never stopped until either the body or mind had worn itself out and stopped working. Everyone carried about, all the time, within oneself life and death. There were two gods sitting on two thrones. One could worship either, but in general mankind had preferred kneeling before death.

The god of denial had won the victory. To reach his throne-room one went through long hallways of evasion. That was the road to his throne-room, the road of evasion. One twisted and turned, felt his way in the darkness. There were no sudden and blinding flashes of light.

John Webster had got a notion regarding his wife. It was sure the heavy inert woman, now looking up into his face from the darkness of the floor, unable to speak to him, had little or nothing to do with a slender girl he had once married. For one thing how utterly unlike they were physically. It wasn't the same woman at all. He could see that. Any one who had looked at the two women could see that they had really nothing physically in common. But did she know that, had she ever thought of that, had she been, in any but a very superficial way, aware of the changes that had taken place in her? He decided she had not. There was a kind of blindness common to almost all people. The thing called beauty, that men sought in women, and that women, although they did not speak of it so often, were also looking for in men wasn't a thing that remained. When it existed at all it came to people only in flashes. One came into the presence of another and the flash came. How confusing that was. Strange things like marriages followed. "Until death do us part." Well, that was all right too. One had to try to get things straight if one could. When one clutched at the thing called beauty in another death always came, bobbing its head up too.

How many marriages among people. John Webster's mind was flying about. He stood looking at the woman who, although they had separated long before they had really and irrevocably separated one day on a hill above a valley in the state of Kentucky was still in an odd way bound to him, and there was another woman who was his daughter in the same room. The daughter stood beside him. He could put out his hand and touch her. She was not looking at himself or her mother, but at the floor. What was she thinking? What thoughts had he stirred up in her? What would be the result to her of the events of the night? There were things he couldn't answer, that he had to leave on the knees of the gods.