happen in the apartment could in any way stir him; the things his wife
might say, her occasional half-hearted outbursts of passion, the
goodness of his mother-in-law who did the work of a servant without
pay--

He sat in the apartment under the electric light pretending to read a
newspaper--thinking. He looked at his hands. They were large,
shapeless, a working-man's hands.

The figure of the girl from Iowa walked about the room. With her he
went out of the apartment and walked in silence through miles of
streets. It was not necessary to say words. He walked with her by a
sea, along the crest of a mountain. The night was clear and silent and
the stars shone. She also was a star. It was not necessary to say
words.

Her eyes were like stars and her lips were like soft hills rising out
of dim, star lit plains. "She is unattainable, she is far off like the
stars," he thought. "She is unattainable like the stars but unlike the
stars she breathes, she lives, like myself she has being."

One evening, some six weeks ago, the man who worked as foreman in the
bicycle factory killed his wife and he is now in the courts being tried
for murder. Every day the newspapers are filled with the story. On the
evening of the murder he had taken his wife as usual to a picture show
and they started home at nine. In Thirty-second Street, at a corner
near their apartment building, the figure of a man darted suddenly out
of an alleyway and then darted back again. The incident may have put
the idea of killing his wife into the man's head.