A couple of days after that, or it might even have been the very next day, through some miracle that was carefully explained to him, while he pretended to listen, he found himself alone in the house in the afternoon. He hesitated a short time before opening the door of Rose’s room. He walked up and down the hall awhile as he had longed to do, and he thought about going into the room. He did not want to go blundering in. After all, once he had gone in, the emptiness that had been increasing in there since her death would be destroyed forever, and he was anxious to catch some impression of it while it still lingered. He walked up and down a few times, thinking intently and rubbing his hands together, and then without thinking any more about it he turned the knob and opened the door and went in and closed the door behind him. There was nothing. There was not even a perceptible emptiness. It was her room, or it had been her room, but she was not in it anymore. The room said nothing. The emptiness, what emptiness he felt there, was not particular, and he could not pretend to himself that he could identify it as a special and individual emptiness that she had left and that she and she alone could have left. It was a general emptiness that filled her place — he might as well have been looking into a fallen nest to try to discover the nature of what was not. He grew tired trying to press himself into what was not there and therefore could not or would not resist him. There was no resistance in the room. There was nothing he could pit himself against. He felt let down, as he had when he was a child and Christmas was over, and at the same time he felt keyed up, as though he were going to have to face an examination, take an examination that he had not been warned about, that he had never known people had to take, that he was not prepared for and could not prepare for, since he had no idea of the nature of the questions that would be asked him or of the tests he might be called upon to perform. He had always felt uneasily that there was something other people knew, something everybody knew and took for granted, but that he did not know. He had sometimes hoped that he might come upon this bit of common knowledge, by luck, as he might come upon a touchstone that would guide him to the secret whose existence he felt, the secret that others had and that remained closed to him. What he had thought out loud in his own mind always was, “There must be more than this to life, there must be more to life than this.” Oh, indeed indeed, yes, there must be more than this to it all, he used to think, and then, at such incredulous moments, he used to look into the faces of the people who passed him in the street, to try to read in their faces what he was sure they must know that kept them going every day, because it was not everybody that had his strength, and it was not everybody — there was hardly anybody who could have the fortitude to keep on going day in day out in the bewilderment in which he himself lived. It was not possible that others could go from day to day, as he did, for no real reason, or that others could put up the brave front that he put up, the brave, respectable front that was a front for nothing, and nothing but a front. At such moments, when he felt that he must make one more attempt to discover the secret, he used to glance, just glance, into Rose’s face when he felt she would not notice him looking at her. He remembered that at such times, on those evenings, he used to hang his hat and coat in the hall as usual, and put his umbrella in the stand, and walk down the hall to where she sat, and he would sit down opposite to her and open his evening paper, but at such times he would use the evening paper only to camouflage himself as a reader while he watched her, not as a husband, not even as a man, but as a supplicant who hoped she might be able to tell him what had kept them together all these years, or what kept any two people together, or what kept people going and doing as they had been told they ought to do. When had all this obedience begun and who had marked out the appointed way where men and women walked without protest and most of the time without complaining? Most important of all, what reason had been given that guaranteed this obedience and why had the reason not been given to him as well as to everybody else? There was a common secret that he had not been allowed to share, and now it seemed that grief must also remain a secret to him, because even now, sitting in the room in which she had spent a good part of her time, and in which she had slept in her bed, he felt no grief. He was sitting on the straight chair she had kept handy to her sewing machine. The sewing machine was closed and made a flat smooth surface that was faintly marked by whitened circles, where she had kept some of her plants when the machine was not in use. She could have got herself a little plant table. He would not have minded the expense. He would have given her the money for a table, if she had asked him for it, but she had not asked. She had preferred to play the martyr and so, contemptuously and in despair of ever coming to any terms with her, he had ignored her or, as you might put it, let her have her way. She had preferred to clear the top of her chest of drawers when she wanted to do any sewing on the machine. Then to the top of the chest of drawers she would lift the plants, some of them big and heavy, and when they were all safely arranged she would open the sewing machine and go to work, bending very close to it. And with the work finished, she would go through the whole laborious process of transferring the plants back to the machine again. The machine was a makeshift plant table for her, as much in her life had been makeshift. Take, for example, that arrangement of old chocolate boxes on the blanket chest under the shelf where she had kept her few books. You would think, to see those chocolate boxes, and to note the careful order in which they were arranged, by size and also by shape, a rectangular one set straight and centered on top of a larger rectangle, the square ones built up like child’s blocks on top of the squares, and the two long equal ones set apart from the rest, completing the design of even lines and sharp angles, all of it speaking of neatness and care and of an overpowering concern with order — you would think, looking at such an arrangement, that the boxes contained something of interest or of value. And what did they contain? Old bills marked paid thirty years before. Recipes for dinners she had never cooked, dinners so elaborate that she must have been dreaming of a visit from the king and queen of England when she cut the menus out of the magazines in which she had found them. Directions for making dresses that she would never in her life have had occasion to wear — there was a whole pamphlet that gave instructions, measurements, etc., for the construction of a satin ball gown. It would have been laughable if it was not so pathetic. One box contained cards of tailor’s samples — bits of tweed, bits of serge, bits of velvet, bits of suiting and coat materials. He knew how she had come by those cards. She had never told him, but he had known her so well that he knew very well how she had come by those cards. He could see her now, standing in front of the tailor’s window, one tailor one time, another tailor another time, admiring the bolts of cloth in the window and the pictures displayed of suits and coats, and imagining to herself that she would order something, a costume, as she would have called it, and making up her mind how she would like it made and out of what material. He could see her making up her mind, and opening the door of the shop, and going inside with that timid air of consequence that she affected in public and that had nearly driven him mad with irritation. And he could see her approaching the tailor, and speaking in the accents of a lady who may or may not bestow her custom here, and discussing with the tailor the cut and style of this coat or skirt or whatever it was she imagined she was going to buy for herself. And he could see her, in all her seriousness, taking the card of samples from the tailor and bringing it home and sitting down by herself in the afternoon to dream over it, carrying it to the window so that she could look at the scraps of fabric in a better light, and only lifting her eyes from it to look at the flowers in her garden, and all the time dreaming, dreaming, dreaming, always dreaming, and what was it that she had dreamed about, all her life? She had never said. She had never even admitted how she dreamed her time away. If you had asked her what she was “thinking” about, she would have said, “Oh, nothing,” and then quickly turned her hands to something to divert attention from herself. Or she might have replied, in answer to any question at all, “There is a bad scratch on the linoleum near the door there. I was wondering what I could do to cover it.” She was all indirection.