derive final embalming fluid for his vanity by pitying the distractions and unrest of others.

Then he died. The sight of her husband lying under the glass of the coffin had reminded Mrs. Basine of the curious fact that in their youth love had brought them together. A memory burrowed its way from under the débris of twenty-six years and confronted her. A memory of wild nights, flushed cheeks, shining eyes, hope and careless words. And the dim yesterday, the long-forgotten yesterday that lay in the coffin with the paunchy figure of the bald-headed silk-merchant became suddenly real again.

When she was alone that night Mrs. Basine wept miserably for a love that had died twenty-five years ago and lain buried and unmourned under the débris of these years. A tardy exhibition of grief, sincere but enfeebled by its own age, it spent itself in a few hours. The tears for the memory of vanished youth and vanished love of which the body waiting in the coffin had become for a space of grotesque symbol, were followed by the inarticulate sense of an anti-climax.

Howard Basine's dying was somehow not a tragedy to the woman who had lived with him for twenty-six years. When she had wept at first, the idea of death came like a panic to her heart. Things had died. Days, nights, hopes had died. But she had been unaware of their dying. The figure of her husband leaving for his day's work, returning from his day's work, sitting at the head of the table, retiring to bed with her—this had been a mask behind which the dying of things remained concealed.

Now that he had closed his eyes and vanished it was as if a mask had been removed. One could see all at once all the things that had died. And she saw not only Howard lying dead, but most of herself. In her mind she had no memory of the illusory selves she had lived, like her husband, alone. These illusory selves whose successes and romances she had caressed in secret had of late abandoned her. Like her husband she had turned to the shells they had created about themselves as the comforting reward of her life's negation.

Now it struck her that these shells were full of dead things. While he lived they had seemed alive. The fact that the man with whom she had survived twenty-six years continued to talk and to move had given her the vague feeling that these years were also still alive, still existent somewhere. Now the man was dead and the years were dead with him. They had been dead all the while but they had not lain in a coffin for one to look at like this.

Dead years. And she, a survivor. Her sense of contact with the past deserted her. She was alone. Everything that had been was no more and it seemed during her grief as if it had never existed.

She lay and wept, feeling that something had been terribly wasted. Once there had been youth. Now there was age. She had already lived but how, where? Look, she was already old but how had it happened? She who could remember so many things about youth—her pretty face, her careless hopes, bright, happy excitements; and most of all, the feeling that things lay ahead—that a store of mysterious things waited for her—she who could remember it so plainly was an old woman. It had seemed natural before he died but now it seemed unnatural. She would die soon, too. Her youth—something she thought of as youth, arose and stretched out far-away arms to her. It came to her in the night and stood smiling at her like a ghost of herself. Yes, she was already dead and she could lie in bed weeping for her husband and staring with tired eyes at memories. Thoughts did not disturb her. Her emotions, grown too involved for the shallows of her mind, gave her the consciousness merely of a panic.

But the panic left. It receded slowly and the death of her husband stirred in her during the first weeks of mourning a gentle affection for the man. She closeted herself with the memories that had terrified her—sensual memories of an impetuous lover, an idealization of a long-forgotten Howard. And her sorrow became like a vague honeymoon shared with slowly dissolving erotic shadows.

This too went. As it went away the widow became curiously younger in her features, her black clothes, her mannerisms. She grew to find the loneliness of her bed desirable. She would snuggle kittenishly between the empty sheets, an unintelligible sense of immorality—as if it were immoral to sleep alone—lending a luxury to her weariness.

Yes, it was somehow nicer to sleep alone, to have the bedroom all to herself. In her mind things that were different from the routine of her life and that belonged to the secret imaginings that had once filled her days were immoral. And this was different—being alone. So her living on without her husband became an odd sort of infidelity, pleasant, diverting.

The year and a half passed bringing a rejuvenation to her body. Her youth and its decline were buried in a coffin. Now at fifty-two she was living again and creating out of the remains of her figure, coiffure and complexion a new youth—at least a new exterior.

The dreams of her earlier days returned to her and she no longer found it necessary to deny them all reality. It had been necessary before in order to keep herself fitted into the shell. And as a result her dreams, denied any possibility of realization, had become like his, more and more fantastic, more and more warmly improbable. Now there was no need for a shell. There was no need to preserve an easily recognizable and never failing characterization. She had done that before so as to avoid confusing her husband and herself and she had been rewarded by a similar ruse employed by him.

Now that he was gone she found herself changing. She found herself approaching the romantic conception of herself. And since she was able to carry into reality her rejuvenated fancies, to devote herself to looking stunning, to making a somewhat exotic impression upon people, to arousing interest—her imaginings did not expand as before into distorted and improbable pictures. She began to busy herself, to actively give them outlet, to have time or surplus energies for the evolution of fancies beyond her.

She had no plans for the future and she was not interested in any. An amazing fact had come into her life—the present. She abandoned herself to it. She had harnessed what was left of the energies allowed so long to evaporate and the process of evaporation was at an end. She would become, if there was time, a keenly alive, egoistic woman gorging herself upon the desserts remaining at the banquet board before which she had sat for twenty-six years with closed eyes and listless hands.

She felt these things only dimly. There was a freedom to life, like a new taste in her senses. Of this she was confusedly aware. And her sorrow for her dead husband became a pleasant thing, a thing inseparable from the gratitude she unknowingly felt for the new existence his death had given her.

She referred to him with a pensively magnanimous air, inventing perfections in his character and endowing his departed intelligence with a wisdom far beyond her own. This enabled her to utilize his memory in an odd way. When she argued with her friends or children, when she was doubtful concerning the extravagance or selfishness of her actions, or the newly born radicalism of her views, she would quote mercilessly from her dead husband. The fact that he was dead lent a sanctity to whatever views he may have held. Not in her own eyes but, as she shrewdly sensed, in the eyes of others. And she grew to play unscrupulously upon this thing she perceived in her children and friends—that they respected the words and opinions of a dead man infinitely more than those of one alive.

Thus she was able to indulge herself in ways which would have astounded and