THEN cried the messenger: "Come,

T cease thy grieving. Thy joy was

terrible and exquisite. But here are other joys, for God is kind"

Other joys! No, that was not what she wanted. If God were kind, he would let her keep her grief, always, always, as keen and sharp as it was now. "Time cures all things," they told her stupidly; "you will get over it." But that was the one thing that she dreaded; that time might take it away from her, might dull the agony of sorrow that filled her, was all of her, like a keen, sharp sword in the sheath of her body. Their joy had been terrible and exquisite, but just as terrible, more exquisite, was the pain of losing him. It was all she had left. She would keep it. No one had ever suffered as she suffered. There was no tenderness in it, no sweet self-pity. His death had come like the sudden blast of an explosion that had laid waste her life, bared it to the arid rock. She would not try to plant it again with feeble, stunted things where before had been such luxuriance.

"Let me die. Let me die. Let me die," she had whispered, shuddering, between her clenched teeth, again and again, in those first days that were no more awful than these days, though almost a year had passed. Then sometimes that insistent whisper would become an inward shout, though soundless, like a volcanic eruption under the sea. She could do nothing but pace up and down her room, her handkerchief pressed to her lips, throw herself on her bed, tear open her dress to pummel with her fists on her heart where the pain burned. Sometimes she would stretch out her arms (her whole body energized until it became merely an instrument of supplication, seemed to stream up to the quiet unseen forces that control the world, as if it must compel their attention by the very blatancy and concentration of its appeal)

and implore to be sent where he had gone. And if he were nothing, she would be nothing, too. What had she to do with this world, where people moved about, performing ordinary tasks: shopped, visited each other, laughed? She was like a bee whose wings had been torn from its back, crawling on the floor of a busy hive. She could never be as the others were, never again. Even the chairs in her house, the rugs and hangings and tables, seemed in their comfortable complacency alien to her. She felt that she ought to be surrounded by restless flames.

"Love's sad satiety." Some one had spoken of that, some poet, but he was wrong. She knew. He was wrong! Perhaps if they had been allowed to live together a long time, they might have discovered each other completely, gone to the very bottom of each other, and after that it was conceivable that even their love, which had been so compelling, such a savage adventure-their love that had transformed them to two stern angels before whose fiery swords forbidden doors crashed wide-might have left them, become after many years a little tame, casual, as were the relations of most married people. Satiety! But that was not sad. When one has been permitted to go to the end, had all there is, one should be content. But to have been ruthlessly torn apart, as they were, at the very beginning

dragged away at the opening bars of the symphony-that was not to be borne. It had maimed her forever. She wouldn't recover. She didn't want to recover.

She held her furs close about her throat and walked with bent head against the wind, keeping her eyes on the pavement. "Let me die. Let me die." That phrase threaded through her consciousness as it always did, even when she was talking with people or riding in her motor. It was always there, though sometimes only

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like the unnoticed tick of a clock in a room.

At Fifty-ninth Street she turned and walked up-town again through the park. It didn't matter where she went, but to cross that crowded corner, restless with traffic, would require of her a concentration on her surroundings that she was too weary to give. Though there was no point, it was true, in her making any effort to avoid the stream of motors other than the feeling that if she were knocked down, hurt, there would be crowds, questioning policemen. She might be dragged out of the dark retreat of her despair, like some underground animal, into the glare of human activity.

"Let me die." She sat down on one of the empty benches and leaned her head on her hand. Before her were tall wired enclosures, behind which brown deer wandered aimlessly, nibbled at the ground, stared with ruminative eyes over the heads of the little groups of children and their nurses. They were trying to remember something, something that had passed, something, perhaps, that they had never known. Trying to remember, thinking.

It was cold. A torn newspaper, whirled by the wind, caught against her feet. Some empty peanut-shells, with which the bench was untidily strewn, clung to the fur of her coat. She stared at them but made no effort to brush them away.

When she closed her eyes she could feel the vibration of her heart, her hidden heart, beating, beating in the darkness, like a tiny engine on a ship. If only she could plunge at it with her hands and tear it out, tear it out!

She noticed a woman coming slowly toward her, walking in a wavering, aimless way. She

stopped uncertainly before the bench on which Judith was sitting and started to fumble with her hand-bag of cracked leather. She had closed it, it seemed, with a safety-pin, but the safety-pin would not open. Tightening her lips, she struggled with it, pressing it against a red thumb that protruded from her black knitted glove. Finally she sat down heavily, and, putting her bag to her mouth, bit on the pin, holding her head to one side, like a squirrel cracking a nut. This succeeded and she removed the pin, stuck it into the lapel of her dingy coat, and wiped her mouth with her hand.

Judith leaned back her head again and closed her eyes. That creature, the peanut-shells, the torn papers, they were all alike, all outside. What could they matter to her? "Let me die. Let me die."

After a time she moved restlessly, tapped her foot on the pavement, clenched her fists, and opened her eyes. The woman was still there. But now she held a man's handkerchief bunched together in her two hands as if to hide its griminess. And she continually rolled it about and kneaded it. Every once in a while she would pull out a soiled corner of it, and, drawing down her mouth grotesquely, give a trembling upward rub to her flat

nose.

Judith looked at her listlessly, at her long, sagging brown skirt with three rows of dusty braid on the bottom of it; at her feet, knobby with curious hidden excrescences, lying on their sides, the soles of her shoes facing each other. Her hat was of shapeless black straw, with what had been a rose tacked on one side of it. That rose! It had been drenched by rain, scorched by the sun until it was now no more than a colorless bunch of wrinkled bits of cloth. It served no purpose. It was neither useful nor beautiful, and merely stayed there because no one thought about it at all— as superfluous as embroidery would be on a dish-cloth.

The woman kneaded her handkerchief in her hands again, then wiped her eyes. She gave a trembling, liquid sniff.

So this creature too was unhappy. There was, of course, a turgid stream of common misery running through the world. Every one, sooner or later, was caught in it, carried along for a time, mud

died by it. That was what her friends kept repeating to her in exasperation at her continued frigid aloofness, her passive disinterest in life now that the decent period of mourning was over. "Really, my dear, you are not the only woman who has lost the man she loves. Good heavens, we all do more or less! But that's no reason-and, after all, to have had him die is not as bad as-well, there are other ways of losing a husband, you know." And, though they tried to appear to be very sympathetic and grave as they looked at her, she could tell by the slight smiles lifting the corners of their mouths that they thought her rather absurd. But their amusement made no more impression on her than had their unwelcome sympathy in the beginning. They simply didn't understand. Since life, like some clumsy practical joker, had chosen to strike her happiness from her hands so soon after putting it there, she would always despise it, look upon it with contempt, and never, never forgive or forget. There was a scale of aristocracy in grief; hers was regal, as different, for instance, from the shoddy troubles of that woman next her as is mud from black onyx. Mud, though unpleasant, could be easily dissolved and washed away, but onyx was precious and indestructible.

Her arm on the back of the bench, her chin in her gloved hand, she gazed for a time at the inert, scaly shoes of the woman huddled there.

"Why are you crying?" she said at last.

The woman turned to her, frightened. Her face was blotched and glistening with the easy tears of old age. It was as if the tears had exuded from it everywhere. She started to speak, but her mouth only distorted ludicrously and, staring at Judith, she gave a broken, whining sound, somewhat like the meow of a cat.

"What is it?" Judith asked again impatiently. "You needn't be afraid of me. Are you ill?"

In the syrupy high voice that accompanies the tears of children and old people, she replied: "I got enough to make me cry, God knows!"

"Have you?"

"It ain't as if I ever done no harm to nobody," she went on. "I've tried to work honest all my life. I'm a poor

woman and I ain't never done harm to nobody and now-" Her voice rose in a thin quaver. She choked and coughed. "Well, go on," said Judith. "What has happened?"

"I used to do cleaning down to Hoffheimer's restaurant. Every morning at four regular I was there, scrubbing under the tables and mopping up that that was spilled from the parties. But it's sloppy work and the wet give me cold. I swear to God I wasn't away more than two nights, but when I come back they laid me off. I'm a poor woman, but I wasn't away more than two nights

"Laid you off?" Judith interrupted. "What does that mean?"

I

"They got another one to come in. lost it. It aren't fair, that's what it is." Hoffheimer's at four in the morning! Judith shuddered. Cigarette ends floating, dirty glasses, all the repulsive aftermath of cheap gaiety-"It must have been very unpleasant work," she said. "I should think that you would be relieved not to have to do it any more."

"It was a grand job," sighed the woman. She began to cry again. "My husband, he's sick. I don't know what we're going to do now, honest I don't."

Judith sat for a time in silence. "There is plenty of misery in the world." Yes, but wasn't it, most of it, like this, misery that could easily be relieved by a change of circumstance or a little money? Money! She smiled contemptuously. And they could compare it with her sorrow that could never be lightened, never, by all the riches, by anything that existed on earth! Suppose that she proved it, merely for her own satisfaction, merely because there was nothing else to do.

"Where do you live?" she asked, suddenly rising to her feet.

startled.

The woman looked up, "Where do you live?" "Over near First Avenue," she said at last.

"Come," Judith commanded. "We'll go to your house. I may be able to help you."

"Help me? Are you giving me a job?" "You'll see later what I intend to do. Get up."

The woman lifted herself laboriously from the bench, stuffed the handkerchief

in her bag, and fumbled with uncertain fingers at the safety-pin on her coat. "Don't trouble to fasten it now," said Judith coldly.

The woman hung back a minute, afraid, but as Judith started, without turning her head to see if she were following, toward the entrance to the park, she shuffled after her.

They stood together side by side on the pavement. Judith raised her hand as a bright taxicab rushed by. It stopped, slid up to the curb, and backed. The driver leaned over and opened the door. "Go in," she said.

The woman put one foot on the step and the taxi leaned sideways, seemed to groan with the weight of her. She drew up the other foot, and then, standing on the step and clinging to the door, she looked around over her shoulder timorously.

"It's all right," Judith encouraged her. "Please hurry a little."

Stumbling over her skirt, she entered the little brown interior and fell to the seat. Judith followed swiftly. "Now tell me the address of your house."

"Four hundred and two East Thirtyninth Street. But it ain't a house; it's only a room." As the car plunged through the traffic she clung desperately to the edge of the seat. She had never, Judith supposed, been in a taxicab before. Well, that was nothing to complain about, certainly.

A faint odor of perfume mingled with the smell of dusty leather in the car. The nearness of this woman, breathing heavily through her mouth, only made her more acutely aware of her own exquisiteness, of the delicate poignancy of her grief, not coarsely smeared over the surface, but hidden deep in the darkness of her heart. And she stared ahead of her as they rode along in silence, only conscious of her companion in the detached and completely impersonal way that she might be conscious of some rough bundle, tied with paper and string, beside her on the seat.

The taxicab stopped before a dark and dingy doorway squeezed between a second-hand clothing-shop and a vegetablestall. The outside of the shop was black with men's coats, hanging with outstretched sleeves, bunches of worn trou