he thought with a smile of the heat and the flies and the ugliness of Mac’s hotel. And he made her week-ends alluring and beautiful.
About the middle of the autumn Valerie asked herself again, as she walked on the coast road one night, if she really did want to go through the winter on the paper. Various influences had been at work upon her in the last month. As a place of residence, Mac’s was becoming unbearable, her room more like a box every day, and the dining-room the last word in sordidness. The curtains, always sagging and uneven, had become intolerably so by the number of times noticed. The serrated and ravined cut glass on the sideboard, viewed with indifference for a thousand times, had become painful at one thousand and one. And always as she lay in bed now she could smell the amalgamated pungency of the beer from the front and the stables at the back. Even Bob and Father Ryan had suffered some kind of eclipse, and as table company, had become dull.
And as she walked there drifted through her mind with the force of a warning the lines Dane had humorously quoted to her one night when she had read to him the first letter her mother had written after hearing of the marriage—“Some little talk a while of me and thee There seemed, and then no more of thee and me.”
“No more of thee and me.” The words repeated themselves over and over in her brain. Then she told herself for the hundredth time that she was thinking only of herself, that she had done nothing but think of herself. And after all her own contract demanded that she think of Dane. She was not keeping her own terms.
He saw two nights later, as she lay with him in the hammock, that she had something on her mind.
When she had smoked half her cigarette she threw it
