third person was within himself, inside his body. He addressed the
third person.

"Well, there is this woman, this person I married, she has the air of
something accomplished," he said, as though speaking aloud. Sometimes
it almost seemed to him he had spoken aloud and he looked quickly and
sharply at his wife. She continued reading, lost in her book. "That may
be it," he went on. "She has had these children. They are accomplished
facts to her. They came out of her body, not out of mine. Her body has
done something. Now it rests. If she is becoming a little bag-like,
that's all right."

He got up and making some trivial excuse got out of the room and out of
the house. In his youth and young manhood the long periods of walking
straight ahead through the country, that had come upon him like
visitations of some recurring disease, had helped. Walking solved
nothing. It only tired his body, but when his body was tired he could
sleep. After many days of walking and sleeping something occurred. The
reality of life was in some queer way re-established in his mind. Some
little thing happened. A man walking in the road before him threw a
stone at a dog that ran barking out of a farm-house. It was evening
perhaps, and he walked in a country of low hills. Suddenly he came out
upon the top of one of the hills. Before him the road dipped down into
darkness but to the west, across fields, there was a farm-house. The
sun had gone down, but a faint glow lit the western horizon. A. woman
came out of the farmhouse and went toward a barn. He could not see her
figure distinctly. She seemed to be carrying something, no doubt a milk
pail; she was going to a barn to milk a cow.

The man in the road who had thrown the stone at the farm dog had turned