But it also drew you closer, your hand beneath her arm as you walked downstairs.

You mustn’t mind Mother, he said, in an effort to console.

No, she said vaguely. Of course. After all, we know each other so well.

But still as if his voice, its intention, had touched only on the distant fringes of her mind. She was stiff with terror of his hand that provoked a trembling in her body. She was afraid of what she would do, say next. If some uncontrolled instinct would take possession, if she could provide a clue to the box she had bought and lost, then take cover in the darkness with her face and her admission.

I’m glad you have your convictions, Connie, he said.

They’re not always comfortable.

Or the cold that was also your own body through the door he opened.

They were standing on a dark step. He tried to find her in the darkness, interpret through the face what he couldn’t gauge by a voice. Because this seemed to be hinting at a personal life in Connie Tiarks.

Goodnight, Elyot, she said quickly. You’ll catch cold.

There was no longer any shadow in her voice. It implied at once the lemon drinks she brewed for old bronchitic ladies, or a cup of Bengers by a boarding-house fire.

This after all, he said, was Connie Tiarks, and the indignation for a lost cause that she couldn’t quite express. But the conviction was there, the hands twisted in the lap to a desperate yellow-white. Upstairs, taking off his clothes, he became suspended, isolated, in the lit box of his own room. It contained the whole of Elyot Standish. All the emotion, the frustration you had experienced at any time, spilled nightly into this receptacle, no farther, just as there was no intrusion from the outer darkness, none of that wash of distant events that instinctively affected Connie Tiarks. Connie overflowed, dissolved, became part of a mass emotion, that was too abstract, impersonal, you couldn’t identify yourself with this. Just as you hung back on the edge of crowds. You remained intact. You could not speak the language of their emotions, share the mass sympathies and fears. You had no relationship with these.

Sleep met him half-way, or the allegory of waking, it was the Greco she had seen, the centurion in Spain, he was walking in the field which was where he lost, beyond the white cocoon, when others asked a priest, or went to Spain, there were many roads out of the field of sleep, the difficulty was to choose, there were many roads the feet took without faces, these were directionless, he was walking in a white sleep, there were the priests as white as aspirin, there was the saxophonist talking to the old ladies, the old clown, and the sleeping figures, your own, lay in the white cocoon, it was a personal Spain, it was a destruction of the superfluous, either the priest or the glass box, it could not write, write too fast, it could not write the papers black from white, this was sweat, the necessity, if I do not do this you said, if not the singing priest the no more love, the wilted brown nipples that were bitter on the mouth, and losing the face, it was the face of Joe, they had lopped the tree, it lay in blood, you could not touch, because the eyes, your eyes, became the mirror that moved too clearly to, that saw too clearly right down to the heart, and the blood moving in a cone of glass, it was the clearness that revolted, that you didn’t want to see, you put up a hand to hide your own bones and a transparent, fruitless egg.