He went and threw himself, thus naked on the bed. There were four sleeping rooms in the upper floor of the house. His own was at a corner and there were doors opening into his wife's and his daughter's rooms. When he had first married his wife they had slept together, but when the baby came they gave that up and never did it afterward. Once in a long while now he went into his wife at night. She wanted him, let him know in some woman's way that she wanted him, and he went, not happily or eagerly, but because he was a man and she a woman and it was done. The thought wearied him a little. "Well it hasn't happened for some weeks." He did not want to think about it.
He owned a horse and carriage that was kept at a livery stable and now it was being driven up to the door of the house. He heard the front door close. His wife and daughter were driving out into the country. The window of his room was open and a breeze blew in and across his body.
III
When he awoke an hour later he was at first frightened. He looked about the room wondering if he had been ill.
Then his eyes began an inventory of the furniture of the room. He did not like anything there. Had he lived for twenty years of his life among such things? They were no doubt all right. He knew little of such things. Few men did. A thought came. How few men in America ever really thought of the houses they lived in, of the clothes they wore. Men were willing to go through a long life without any effort to decorate their bodies, to make lovely and full of meaning the dwellings in which they lived. His own clothes were hanging on a chair where he had thrown them when he came into the room. In a moment he would get up and put them on. Thousands of times, since he had come to manhood, he had gone through the performance of clothing his body without thought. The clothes had been bought casually at some store. Who had made them? What thought had been given to the making of them or to the wearing of them either? He looked at his body lying on the bed. The clothes would enclose his body, wrap it about.
A thought came into his mind, rang across the spaces of his mind like a bell heard across fields. "Nothing can be beautiful that is not loved."
