Roy was eighteen months old, big and healthy and already argumentative, before Lora paid the debt she owed Albert Scher.
By that time the debt was a large one, though doubtless he did not consider it a debt at all. When the baby was only a week old he had appeared one evening at the room, astonished to find that it was all over. He had expected, he said, to be on hand, and was furious to learn that the doctor had been replaced by a midwife. Midwives were not worth a damn, they were dirty and superstitious, and might easily ruin a baby’s entire life by giving it an ugly and erroneous first impression. Lora replied that doctors were swindlers and pigs, and anyway look at the baby—nothing wrong with that baby. Doctors were expensive, Albert agreed, that’s what he had come for; and pulled from his pocket a roll of crumpled bills and proceeded to count it out upon the bed.
“Hundred and sixty-two dollars,” he announced. “Oh, it’s not mine, I never had that much money in my life. I described your classic plight to some of my friends and they passed the hat. Not a jitney from me, I couldn’t afford it. This was to be for the doctor; now what?”
“It won’t be wasted,” said Lora. “If I tried to thank you I’d cry. I cried yesterday because Mrs. Pegg brought me some soup. I hope I soon get over it.”
But that was a small part of the debt; it was he who solved the problem of a job for her. She had tried to think of something that would permit her to have the baby with her, at least something that would not keep her away all day, but besides office or counter work there seemed to be nothing she could do. Thanks to the generosity of Albert’s friends there was no immediate hurry, but she wanted to keep something in reserve. What if the baby got sick? Worse, what if she did? For the first time she began in dead earnest to appraise her situation and calculate the possibilities, and decided in the end that she was in a hell of a fix. Luck would see her through, nothing else. To pretend that hard work, any work that she could do or would be permitted to do, could bring ease or security or even a pleasant though hazardous journey along the road she was started on, was pure buncombe.
The immediate luck came through Albert, who turned up one day with the news that a friend of his would like to have her for a series of posters for Daintico Dental Cream. At least he would like to see her. Only, Albert said, she must first get some new clothes. Lora refused point-blank to squander her cherished capital on such a risk, but finally he persuaded her; and on a September afternoon, leaving the baby with Mrs. Pegg, she went in her new dark green tight-fitting suit, deep brown hat and alligator-skin shoes, to an elaborate studio in the Fifties. A smooth little man, polite and effusive, with a pale miniature moustache and no eyebrows at all, accepted her for the job at once on generous terms. She would be an inspiration, he said; and would be needed only two hours a day.
It was that same afternoon on her way home that she sent a telegram to her father and mother. Since the baby’s coming she had written them three letters, the first since she had left them, but sent none. For one thing, she had feared they might somehow trace her address through a letter, and for another she didn’t like what she had written. Re-read the next day, they sounded like bragging, and she didn’t want to brag; strength doesn’t brag, and they should, indeed they should, feel her strength! But this afternoon, passing a telegraph office, on the impulse she entered and sent a wire to Mr. and Mrs. Leroy Winter.
Hurrah nine pound baby boy born July twentieth named Leroy mother and child doing nicely father not to be found.
The girl at the desk counted the words and surveyed her with cold hesitation, wondering, perhaps, if this should not be refused on the ground of obscenity; but finally mumbled, sixty-nine cents. She added mechanically, “Your address at the bottom in case of reply.”
“It isn’t necessary,” said Lora, paid and departed.
The man with no eyebrows she called, in her mind and to Albert, Daintico. His name was Holcomb Burleigh. The third day she went there he asked her to dine with him; she declined, saying that she never went out evenings, she had to stay with her baby.
“I know, Scher told me,” he said. “You’re a brave little woman, Miss Winter. A noble woman.”
“Sure,” Lora said.
A week later he asked her again; arrangements could be made about the baby, he suggested. No, Lora said, she wouldn’t like to do that. Lunch then. Goodness, no, lunch was impossible, she always went out with the baby at noon and stayed three hours; that was more impossible than evening even, for then he was usually asleep. Daintico blinked at her and appeared to give it up.
But two months later he presented her with a problem. In the meantime she had had other jobs which Albert found for her—a life class that met once a week, a man who did North Africa and Hawaii for a travel bureau, a young woman who painted her in pink and purple vertical lines and called it simply and unassailably, Study. She was sufficiently good-looking, especially her fine brow and eyes and the clear living quality of her skin, but it was her glorious wealth of hair and the rarity of her type that brought her, finally, more offers than she could accept. Soon Albert’s offices were no longer needed; she could choose and reject; and when he brought her another summons from Daintico she hesitated, then decided her first client should not be abandoned.
He used her for an outing series for a fashionable sports apparel shop. This, she thought, was ridiculous, it should have been a bobbed-hair flapper; what was the matter with him? She found out one day towards the end, she was to return only once more, when he took her hand suddenly, kissed it, and with a quiet and remarkable dignity asked her to marry him.
The next day, seated on a bench in Washington Square with Roy’s carriage beside her, wrapped in a thick wool coat with a fur collar against the December wind, she told Albert about it. He often joined her there, usually briefly, sometimes sitting with her for an hour or more. Now and then he even pushed the carriage as they encircled the Square, amusing Lora with his unconscious defiant glare at the casual glances of passersby.
“You misunderstood him,” Albert declared. “If Burleigh ever marries he’ll have to be kidnapped. He was reciting poetry.”
“He made it fairly clear,” said Lora. “He said he would ask me only to exchange Miss Winter for Mrs. Burleigh and let time defeat him or make him the happiest of men.”
“I told you it was poetry,” He glanced at her, frowning. “I might have known it would be something like this. A cottage at Great Neck, a new carriage of art wicker for the baby and a nurse with sterile rubber gloves, even a chauffeur perhaps if all goes well.…Ha! To this, Venus has come.” He got to his feet, thrust his ungloved hands into his overcoat pockets, and stood looking down at her. “Listen, Lora mia.” That was the first time he called her that. “The baby could be put down to accident and ignorance; I forgive it. It is at any rate an inescapable prostitution, impossible to approve but necessary to condone. But to prostitute that divine body to a clipped lawn and a solarium is an intolerable affront to beauty. You’ll rot; the first of each month, promptly, he’ll pay the rent and the grocer’s bill, and each Saturday night, promptly too, you’ll pay your share of it. To escape that repulsive routine is the first necessity of a decayed and degenerated race. It began fifty thousand years ago when some hairy fool, sick perhaps from over-eating, first discovered that instincts were negotiable. Now we have nymphomaniacs and Lesbians, neurotics and prostitutes, wives and husbands, but Venus and Adonis are dead. Spermatozoa, once laughing children at play innocent even of curiosity, are skinny underpaid old men carrying indecipherable messages from one sickroom to another. The day you marry Holcomb Burleigh I’m going to wear a black band around my sleeve and get drunk.”
“That’s too bad, we’d like to have you at the wedding.”
“Go to hell.”
“What are spermatozoa?”
“You’re too young to be told such things.”
“I’ll ask Roy.” She leaned over the side of the carriage, where he lay with wide-open roving eyes, smiling as he saw her face above him. “Baby, tell me, honey, what are spermatozoa?” She went on without looking up, “Of course you know I told him I wouldn’t marry him.”
“Ha! You’ll marry him.”
She shook her head, making sure the blanket was well tucked in around the edges. “I’m cold, I’ve got to move around.” She stood, shivering a little. “I wouldn’t marry him if he were as handsome as you and as rich as Rockefeller. I wouldn’t marry anybody.”
“If you mean that, Lora mia, I’ll make the band a flaming red and wear it every day.”
“Well, I mean it. Come on, let’s walk.”
She never saw Daintico again, nor heard from him.
With the passing months she wondered mildly about Albert. What was it that moved him, selfish as he was, to devote so many of his hours to her? He said he loved to look at her, that it cooled his eyes to let them serenely enjoy her living loveliness, aloof alike from passion and from puzzles of technique. Having no such high opinion of her comeliness, she doubted this esthetic detachment, but she had to confess that he carried it off. As she knew, there was an apartment on Bank Street and a studio in Patchin Place where he was a privileged and favored visitor; a thousand morsels of Village gossip floated to her as she stood, draped or naked, on rugs or platforms, wondering whether Eileen had found the baby’s rattle or deciding what to take in for dinner—for long since she had moved into a large room downstairs, with a bath partitioned off in one corner and a sink and gas-plate in another. With hot soup and some chops and potatoes and a salad, she loved to sit in the big soft chair and eat leisurely, Roy in his crib not ten feet away against the wall, within her view, his eyes shaded by a scarf draped over the side of the crib, with a magazine or novel on the table beside her plate. It amused her sometimes to feed him and eat her own meal simultaneously; the double sensation brought a confusion of pleasure and each stimulated the other. “Wait a minute,” she would say, “the salad comes next, can’t you wait a minute, pig? Not there, you ninny, this one is the salad.”
She had never seen the studio, nor the apartment, nor the tenant of either, but she had heard all about them. One, Marie Stoeffer, tall and dark and not too young, was a secretary in an office downtown; the other, Anita Chavez, also dark but not so tall and much younger, modelled furs at Russeks. What she chiefly overheard regarding them was the argument, often repeated, now desultory, now furious, as to whether either knew of the other’s existence. Obviously not, one side declared, since the fiery Anita if she knew would stick daggers both in Albert and in her rival, and the dignified Marie, if she even suspected, would put a new lock on her door.
At about this point Lora would decide to try hamburger and onions for dinner, and not have any salad.
It was in midsummer that she received an unheralded visit from Anne Whitman. Coming home early one afternoon from a job uptown, Eileen, on the sidewalk as usual with Roy in his carriage, greeted her with the announcement that she had a caller. Mrs. Pegg, on her way to the meat market, had stopped and told her, she said; a young woman had come and, being told of Lora’s absence, had prevailed on Mrs. Pegg to let her in to wait. Lora asked Eileen to keep Roy out a little longer and, entering her room, found Anne lying on the bed with her eyes closed.
Lora guessed the story before she heard it, but it was none the less painful. At first Anne wouldn’t talk; she said merely that she didn’t know where Steve was, and that she had come to find out if Lora had seen him or heard from him. Then she sat on the edge of the bed and stared as Lora changed her dress, her hands folded in her lap, motionless.
“I’m going to kill myself,” she said finally.
“Not for Steve Adams, he’s not worth it,” said Lora.
Anne went on, “I started to yesterday, and what stopped me was the thought that maybe he was with you and I could see him. So I went to the tea-room and Mrs. Crosby told me you were still here. You’ve got a new room, it’s very nice. You don’t know where he is?”
“I haven’t seen him since the day he went off with you.”
“Oh. You haven’t. He left me a week ago. Twice before he left me and I found him again and he took me back. He said he pitied me.”
“That’s funny. Steve’s supply of pity—”
“Now I can’t find him.” Anne got up and started to walk towards Lora, then went back and sat down again. “First he went away, uptown, I found him up there with a woman as old as you and me put together, and then in May he went out to Pennsylvania and got a job with the Pittsburgh office of that same oil company. He was out there alone; anyway I didn’t see anybody. God knows where he is now; down at the Federal Oil Company they won’t tell me anything, they say they don’t know.”
She stopped, her eyes levelled on Lora, and said with sudden shrill sharpness:
“I think you’re lying. You’ve seen him.”
“Well, I haven’t.”
“He used to talk about you and call you names and wonder about the baby.”
“How did he know there was one?”
“He didn’t. I don’t know.” Anne got up, took a step, and stood there drooping, all will visibly gone from her body, her face, her spirit. “You’ve got to tell me where he is, Lo, somebody has got to tell me, I’ve done everything I can. I am going to kill myself, really I am.”
“You’re not pregnant are you?”
“No. I thought it was better to be careful, after the way he acted with you.…”
“Yes.” Anne’s shoulders lifted a fraction of an inch and dropped again. “I get money from home.”
Lora regarded her a moment in silence. She sighed, shook herself a little, went to the front window and called out to Eileen to bring the baby in, and then turned again to Anne:
“You’d better lie down a while. Later we’ll have something to eat and talk things over.”
For a month after that she had Anne on her hands. Lora’s old room upstairs was taken for her. She asked that she be permitted to take Eileen’s place in caring for the baby during Lora’s absences, but Lora firmly said no; and she gave Eileen private instructions never to leave Roy alone. She thought Anne was half crazy; there was no other way to account for her idiotic mooning over Steve Adams—over any man, for that matter, but particularly Steve. Of him nothing could be learned, he seemed this time to be gone for good, until one day Lora, nagged into it by Anne and sure that nothing would come of it, wrote a letter to the Federal Oil Company representing herself as Steve’s sister. Within a week a reply came stating that Stephen R. Adams had on July twenty-seventh been transferred to the Shanghai sales office. His mail would be forwarded. The next day, without warning or farewell, Anne disappeared. When Lora got home in the afternoon she was gone.
The little fool has actually made for China, Lora thought, and was convinced of it when no word came from her for months. Autumn arrived; the trees in the Square dropped their scrawny and grimy leaves; snow had fallen and the winter holidays come and gone, when one morning Lora found in the mail an engraved notice which stated that on January eleventh Miss Anne Whitman had been married to Mr. Ernest Joseph Seaver.
Lora never learned the inside of that. Not long after the notice arrived there came a note from Anne inviting her to tea at an address in Brooklyn. She was minded not to take the trouble to go, but for once curiosity got the better of her; and there was Anne in a lovely yellow crepe gown, with a turquoise necklace and a permanent wave, smiling hostess in a large and luxurious living room to a group of chatty ladies none of whom Lora had ever seen before. She had no opportunity with Anne alone; and departed, furious, when it became apparent that there would be none. A month later Anne came to see her, but had little to tell about herself. She had known Ernest Seaver many years, she said, from childhood, in fact; they had been beaux at high school, upstate. He was one of those who get as a reward for heroic patience the cracked and empty shells from which bolder men have removed the kernels; or as Anne put it, “He used to say he’d wait, I’d take him some day; he’s really very sweet, Lo.” She had not rushed off to China, Lora gathered, but precisely where she had gone that summer day did not appear. Home probably, Oneida or Elmira or wherever it was. Steve was mentioned only once and then not by name; when Roy awoke and stirred in his crib Anne got up and went over to look at him and after a moment turned and said abruptly, in a voice so painfully tightened into casualness that Lora winced:
“You haven’t heard from him.”
Lora shook her head, too exasperated to speak, at a suffering so purposeless and so ineffectual. Killing yourself would be better than that, she thought.
As spring approached and it again became possible to spend whole mornings or afternoons outdoors with Roy without half freezing, she began to feel a touch of the restlessness that she remembered so well from that other life which seemed from this distance a dream. She shied violently from the comparison, but that did not remove the unrest. It was an annoyance, for it seemed to her to be clearly unreasonable. She had Roy, wasn’t that enough? He was so sturdy and healthy and smiling that people were constantly stopping to look at him, make faces at him, make noises with their tongue or lips. Surely she could ask nothing better than this. Well…yes. That would be all right, her work was pleasant enough, by no means burdensome, sufficiently well paid. Not too secure though. Fads in models change; that man with a white beard who had been in such demand a year ago was now going around begging. Oh, well, there would always be something to do.…
That was it, then, to bring Roy up, feed him, clothe him, watch him grow—soon he would be talking, he was already a year and eight months. That would be fun. She would teach him to say, Steve Adams is a dirty bum. Not that it mattered about Steve, she was nursing no grudge, but it would be fun to hear Roy say it, not knowing who he was talking about. What should she tell him about his father? That didn’t matter, either, to her, but he would want to know who his father was; all children did, as if it made any difference. The war would do. Your father was shot in the war, my son, fighting for his country. Ha, thousands of children would be told that whose fathers would really, at that very moment.…Enough of fathers, the less said about them the better. If she had a clever tongue like Albert.…
Where was Albert this afternoon, by the way? She hadn’t seen him for three days. Had he deserted Venus? Not likely; obviously he still liked to be with her; he was so transparent. Probably he was busy finding a successor to Marie, who had recently married and gone to France on her honeymoon.
She would like to go to France—that was an idea! She had over three hundred dollars saved in the bank, more than enough. There were lots of artists there too, thousands of them, and it wouldn’t matter whether she spoke French or not. But Roy would make it difficult. What if something went wrong, that would be a fine fix, broke and without resource in a distant and foreign country, with a sick baby perhaps and unable even to understand what the doctor said. It was bad enough when you could understand them; no matter what they said you always felt they were entirely too intimate with death to be trustworthy. Like last summer when Roy had the colic and Doctor Berry called it some long name, rubbing his hands, as much as to say, ha, I know that fellow, we’ve had some great old times together.
No, France was out of it. Pretty much everything was out of it, except just this, just today and tomorrow and next week, with Roy not really a baby any more. She wouldn’t teach him to call her Mamma or Mother, he should call her Lora. Why? No particular reason; she liked it better. Her own mother’s name was Evelyn. It suited her all right, soft and mushy, plenty of tears but no.…Oh well. That was done, none of that. Certainly Roy should call her Lora.
She smiled at herself. Here she was, finding out all over again that nothing ever turns out the way you expect it to. At least not the way you picture it. That spring and summer three years ago she used to think, walking home alone from the office or sitting at the switchboard waiting for the buzzer, just wait till she had a baby! She could feel the muscles in her arms fierce around it; she never tired, after a thousand repetitions, of the imagined warmth of its confident sweet-smelling little body. As a matter of fact, she might as well admit it…but no, it wasn’t exactly a bore. But the fierceness soon disappeared or else it just simply wasn’t there. It wasn’t that she minded washing out diapers or getting up in the night or sitting on the floor rolling a ball back and forth instead of reading or mending her clothes; certainly it wasn’t that she had any regrets.…
It did seem though that it was a bit dull. Nothing desperate of course, she could go along all right, and god knows it was better than if, for instance, she had married Daintico and he were always hanging around. Married, no getting away from it. As a husband perhaps, but that was the joke of it, you could get rid of him as a husband if you wanted to, but as a father he was permanent. How could you make that seem sensible? When she had asked the lawyer he had talked a lot of nonsense. It wasn’t just because a man helped make the baby, for unless he was a husband he had no rights at all, which was as it should be. No wonder men wanted to get married.…
She didn’t know a single man, she decided, not one, who was at all fit to be a father. A permanent father. Try to think of one of them that way and you could see how silly it was. Palichak. Mr. Pitkin. Daintico. Albert. Doctor Berry. Any one of them might in a pinch serve for any other imaginable purpose, but as fathers they were all equally unthinkable. Lovers? At that word something stirred within her, unbearable; a deep and bitter pain that exploded into a cloud of vapor which smothered her brain and concealed the source of thought, so that all that was left of everything was a numb resentment, a vast and intolerable discomfort. She forced her way through it with all the scorn of her will. Lovers hell, she thought, what of it, don’t be an ass, anyone would do for that.
The word attacked her again, one evening not long after, under somewhat different circumstances. Up to a certain point it was much like a hundred other evenings that had preceded it. Albert had come in an hour or so after dinner and found her sitting with her legs curled under her in a big chair, her only big chair, brushing her hair preparatory to putting it up for the night, eating peanut brittle and reading a magazine. As dressing-gown she wore a white robe which had originally served as her drapery in a frontispiece for a new edition of Baudelaire. A screen papered in black and silver, with a hole in one corner, bought at an auction on University Place, sheltered Roy’s crib in the corner, and a little heap of coals glowed in the grate, for though it was nearly May the night was quite cool and there was no heat.
She finished her hair, then made some coffee and brought out crackers and cheese. Albert was all in, he said; he had spent the afternoon at the Independents’ and had only one thing left to decide, whether to sit in the bathtub and slash his wrists or get a job in the subway. He lay on his back on the floor in front of Lora’s chair with a cracker in one hand and a piece of cheese in the other, now and then rising on his elbow to take a sip of coffee, demanding of her for god’s sake never to pose again; join him instead, he begged, in a campaign to blow up all paint and canvas factories.
“They’d still have paper and charcoal,” Lora said.
“And ink and tempera and chalk and graphite and bug juice and the blood of plants,” he groaned. “It’s impossible to believe that two things, one as lovely as you and the other as ugly as art, can exist in the same world.”
“You’ll be sorry for that in the morning.”
He grinned. “Half of it maybe. Only half. The other half stays good sober or drunk, morning or night. Even El Greco never made you up.”
“That’s nice.” She smiled back at him. “I never saw an El Greco, but that doesn’t matter, I know you’re crazy about him.” She drained her coffee cup, then, reaching for a cigarette and a match, said suddenly, “You’d better take a good look, for this is your last chance.”
He sat up. “What do you mean? You’re not going away?”
She shook her head no, smiling.
“Getting married!”
Another shake.
He lay down again. “I know what it is, you’re going to paint. I knew you would, everybody does sooner or later. What the hell, I don’t have to look at your pictures, you can turn them to the wall when I come around and I’ll never know. If you have a show you can write my piece about it.”
“Really, I’m serious. I can’t see you anymore. I’m afraid to.”
“Afraid of me? Come now, you’ve withstood my charms nearly two years.”
“Oh, it isn’t that. You’ve been careful not to make it difficult. It’s Miss Chavez.”
He pulled himself up with a jerk, sitting straight, pushing cigarette smoke out of his nose and mouth with the words:
“That little devil! Oh ho! I’ll strangle her with the mantilla the greatest bullfighter in Mexico gave her the day she broke his heart, the little liar. She came to see you, eh? What did she say?”
“No, I haven’t seen her.”
“How is it her then?”
I must be careful, thought Lora, or this won’t come out right at all.
“It’s nothing very definite,” she said, “only I’ve heard things. I hear a lot of talk you know. Apparently Miss Chavez thinks she has discovered that your interest in me is not purely esthetic. She talks too much, I don’t like it.”
“By god, I shall surely strangle her. Who does she talk to?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Everybody.” Lora waved her hand vaguely. “I could stand the talk I suppose, but it seems she’s threatening all sorts of things. Anyway, as you said once, who wants their name signed to a picture they didn’t paint?”
“Blah,” said Albert scornfully. “You don’t know Anita. She’s as harmless as a garter snake. Of course she always talks, but confound it all, when did she start on you? You are my vestal virgin, my Brünnhilde surrounded by a protecting flame, my Eloise inviolate through an unfortunate physiological accident transformed by a perversion into diseased poetry; and she’s got to let you alone or I’ll strangle her.”
“Oh,” said Lora, looking at him straight, “I didn’t know there was anything wrong with you.”
He stared at her and then laughed, bellowing, plumping back on the floor and up again. He didn’t stop laughing.
“Well, I didn’t,” she declared stoutly. “Be quiet, you’ll wake the baby.” She got up and went to the screen and disappeared behind it. Her voice could be heard, low and soothing. Soon she came out again. “You did wake him,” she said. “You’d better go if you’re going to roar like a bull.”
“I’ll be good,” Albert promised. “But my god that was funny. You’re as literal as an academician. The only thing wrong with me, Lora mia, is that there’s nothing wrong with me. In a world of sick men the healthy are perverse. But Anita. Don’t worry about Anita; I’ll fix her. Don’t for god’s sake cast me off; you, the sacred grove where I rest my feet. The true madonna, the hope of the world. I’m going to learn to paint, and do you and Roy, naked in the sun, and call it triumphantly Virgin and Bastard. I hope they’ll let me take it to prison with me, and you must come now and then and let me talk to you.”
“You’re an awful fool,” said Lora. “So is Miss Chavez maybe; all the more reason why you’ll have to find another sacred grove to rest your feet in. I don’t intend to be made uncomfortable for a sin I’ve not committed.”
“And one you’re not interested in.”
“Right. Carefully you didn’t say it. You did also, however, mention a picture you hadn’t painted. And that I’ve been careful not to make it difficult. Are you doing this deliberately?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Ha, you’re not so dumb.” He sat, still on the floor, with his knees crossed and his arms folded, directly in front of her chair, looking up at her; and she felt a quickening in her heart, a faint pleasant alarm through her body and limbs, as she saw his eyes fastened on her with no admiration, no fondness even.
“You’re not so dumb,” he repeated. “But for the sake of clearness let’s put it this way. What would be your reaction if I were to announce that I intend to sleep here tonight, in that rather narrow bed, with you?”
“Announce? To Mrs. Pegg? To Miss Chavez? To the newspapers?”
“Don’t quibble. What about it? You don’t need to look triumphant, I know my voice is trembling. What about it?”
“I’m not triumphant.”
“What about it?”
“Well…it would have one advantage, it would save Miss Chavez from being a liar, wouldn’t it?”
“Many advantages. It would extinguish the flame that surrounds you.”
Lora smiled at him. She had an impulse to touch him too, but kept her hands in her lap. His arms were still folded.
“You’re pretty funny,” she said. “You propose—this, like—this—without ever having wanted to kiss me—”
“I haven’t wanted to kiss you.” His voice trembled in earnest now; he got to his knees, close to her, and put his hands on the arms of her chair; she no longer enjoyed his eyes, but was held by them. “For god’s sake, Lora mia, pay no attention to what I say. From this moment. Until peace comes again. But understand distinctly that I know it is you who did it, though god knows I don’t know why. Ah, I have never touched you before —there—there—good god to be drowned with you—I never expected this.…”