tickled The Fop with a spur in order to check a threatened
belligerence. "But I early learned to keep the irritation of it off my
nerves and the weight of it off my mind. In fact, I early came to make
a function of it and actually to derive enjoyment from it. It was the
only way to master a thing I knew would persist as long as I
persisted. Have you--of course you have--learned to win through an
undertow?"

"Yes, by never fighting it," Graham answered, his eyes on the spray of
color in her cheeks and the tiny beads of sweat that arose from her
continuous struggle with the high-strung creature she rode. Thirty-
eight! He wondered if Ernestine had lied. Paula Forrest did not look
twenty-eight. Her skin was the skin of a girl, with all the delicate,
fine-pored and thin transparency of the skin of a girl.

"Exactly," she went on. "By not fighting the undertow. By yielding to
its down-drag and out-drag, and working with it to reach air again.
Dick taught me that trick. So with my insomnia. If it is excitement
from immediate events that holds me back from the City of Sleep, I
yield to it and come quicker to unconsciousness from out the
entangling currents. I invite my soul to live over again, from the
same and different angles, the things that keep me from
unconsciousness.

"Take the swimming of Mountain Lad yesterday. I lived it over last
night as I had lived it in reality. Then I lived it as a spectator--as
the girls saw it, as you saw it, as the cowboy saw it, and, most of
all, as my husband saw it. Then I made up a picture of it, many
pictures of it, from all angles, and painted them, and framed them,
and hung them, and then, a spectator, looked at them as if for the