The past week alone, without Ethel, had been a dismal and restless period. Ordinarily they spent scarcely a dozen evenings together a month. With nothing to do—with the certainty that he would soon be at his books—she went to bed early, to doze off over a magazine, while he sat up. Half an hour later he would hear the splashing thump as the magazine slid from the bed, and Ethel, aroused, would turn off her light for the night. Left to himself, with no possibility of interruption now that his wife and children were asleep, he was content to sit in his study midnight after midnight, poring over the delights that would never be exhausted, never begin to be rediscovered or examined enough, no matter how long his days should last. (Though he had smiled at the picture, how well he had understood the man shown in a recent New Yorker drawing who, while referring to an open volume, composed a letter which began: “I’m afraid Professor Witherspoon has erred in his quotation of Verlaine. That line, if memory serves, goes rather like this . . .”) These nights of reading and study were perhaps his moments of greatest happiness, tinged though they were with an anxiety to get the utmost out of the hurrying hours. At such times he had a prescience of the shortness of life and grudged the hours for sleep. But with Ethel away, even though he had been ignoring her for so long, he had oddly not known what to do with himself; something was lacking, the quiet rooms were too quiet, he was not comfortable there alone. There was no point in going out for an evening walk; the Drive was crowded with sailors and girls and he would only be depressed by the meaningless love-making unrestrained everywhere—a natural accompaniment of the war, of course, but he wanted no part of it, wanted not even to see it. To his surprise he discovered that, though home, he was homesick; ruefully he remembered that during the week just ended he had telephoned Maine five times. True, he had waited till evening when the rates were lower, but it was an expense he could ill afford—besides being, again, an infringement of wartime regulations. Why had he called and what had he got out of it? What had they talked about? What, for that matter, did they ever talk about? It had been a need for communication merely; but the language they were accustomed to using between them, if language it could be called, was not the means for communicating anything.