When he had tottered¹ out, Dick and Rosemary embraced fleetingly². There was a dust of Paris over both of them through which they scented³ each other: the rubber guard on Dick’s fountain pen, the faintest odor of warmth from Rosemary’s neck and shoulders. For another half-minute Dick clung to the situation; Rosemary was first to return to reality.

“I must go, youngster,” she said.

They blinked at each other across a widening space, and Rosemary made an exit that she had learned young, and on which no director had ever tried to improve.

She opened the door of her room and went directly to her desk where she had suddenly remembered leaving her wristwatch. It was there; slipping it on she glanced down at the daily letter to her mother, finishing the last sentence in her mind. Then, rather gradually, she realized without turning about that she was not alone in the room.

In an inhabited room there are refracting objects only half noticed: varnished⁴ wood, more or less polished brass⁵, silver and ivory, and beyond these a thousand conveyers of light and shadow so mild that one scarcely thinks of them as that, the tops of picture- frames, the edges of pencils or ash-trays, of crystal or china ornaments⁶; the totality of this refraction — appealing to equally subtle reflexes of the vision as well as to those associational fragments in the subconscious⁷ that we seem to hang on to, as a glass-fitter keeps the irregularly shaped pieces that may do some time — this fact might account for what Rosemary afterward⁸ mystically described as “realizing” that there was some one in the room, before she could determine it. But when she did realize it she turned swift in a sort of ballet step and saw that a dead Negro was stretched upon her bed.

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