you'll be wanting your supper, won't you? You hain't often home these
days--whatever it is you're doing. I didn't expect you."

Janet did not answer at once.

"I--I have to go out again, mother," she said.

Hannah accepted the answer as she had accepted every other negative in
life, great and small.

"Well, I guessed you would."

Janet made a step toward her.

"Mother!" she said, but Hannah gazed at her uncomprehendingly. Janet
stooped convulsively, and kissed her. Straightening up, she stood looking
down at her mother for a few moments, and went out of the room, pausing
in the dining-room, to listen, but Hannah apparently had not stirred. She
took the box of matches from its accustomed place on the shelf beside the
clock, entered the dark bedroom in the front of the flat, closing the
door softly behind her. The ghostly blue light from a distant arc came
slanting in at the window, glinting on the brass knobs of the chest of
drawers-another Bumpus heirloom. She remembered that chest from early
childhood; it was one of the few pieces that, following them in all their
changes of residence, had been faithful to the end: she knew everything
in it, and the place for everything. Drawing a match from the box, she
was about to turn on the gas--but the light from the arc would suffice.
As she made her way around the walnut bed she had a premonition of
poignant anguish as yet unrealized, of anguish being held at bay by a
stronger, fiercer, more imperative emotion now demanding expression,