THE WINDOW OF THE SPHINX
of the doorway as if she were there but for an instant. A long piece of white stuff, with needle adangle, trailed from the other hand, dragging, forgotten, on the ground. Her lips were apart, yet she seemed to suspend breath while her intense eyes gazed. They took him in with their wide, startled flash, from the bandage around his head to his deplorable boots. He had not known that the sight of her would waken such a feeling in him. After two days! He thought he had forgotten her. But to see her there, the symbol of his difficulties, fragile, yet triumphant where he had failed, was to arouse the full tide of his anger against her as it had against the Sphinx. She seemed a part of it, perhaps the very core of it, unreasoning, not to be moved, set there in his path, the perverse deity who had led him and then held him back. Yet, with this feeling came another, more subtle and confused. The impulse he had had, when they whirled upon the carpet, to catch her closer, or fling her as far as he could. Oh, to get hold of her; to put her completely out of the way, upon some high shelf of the universe where she could not do any harm, where she could no longer interrupt his thoughts and disturb his affairs, and of ordinary life make a thing of furies and elations. Or else—well, suppose one could—
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