At home, from his study window, he could see the grape arbor. Each spring he watched the reaffirmation
of the old ferment, the green-snared <symbol> promise of unease. What blossoms the grape has in April and in May:
that tortured, waxlike bleeding less of bloom than leaf, until in the late twilight or darkness of spring Little
Belle's voice would seem to be the murmuring of the wild and waxing grape itself. She would never say,
"Horace, this is Louis or Paul or whoever" but "It's just Horace" and the pale whisper of her small white
dress <rising from the> moving in the hammock, whispering to the delicate and urgent mammalian rifeness of that
curious small flesh which he did not beget. She had just got home from school that afternoon for the week-
end. The next morning he said:

He said: "Honey, if you found him on the train, he probably belongs to the railroad company, and
we'd better send him back. He might get fired even. And we'd hate that."

"He's as good as you are. He goes to Tulane."

"But on the train, honey."

"I've found them in worse places than on the train."

"I know. So have I. But you dont bring them home, you know. You just step over them or around
them and go on. You dont soil your slippers, you know."

"What business is it of yours who comes to see me? You're not my father. You're just – just –"

"What? Just what?"

"Tell Mother then! That's what you're going to do! Tell her!"

"But on the train, honey. If he'd walked into your room in a hotel, I'd just be enraged. But on
the train, I'm disgusted. Let's send him along and start over again."

"You're a fine one to talk about finding things on the train! You're a fine one! Shrimp! Shrimp!"
Then she cried "No! No!" flinging herself upon him in a myriad secret softnesses beneath firm
young flesh and thin small bones. "I didn't mean that! Horace! Horace!" And <in 2 mir->
he could smell that delicate odor of dead flowers engendered by tears and scented powder, and in 2
mirrors he saw her secret, streaked small face watch the back of his head with pure dissimulation,
forgetting that there were 2 mirrors.

<He and Belle had been married 10 years.> When the swift, hard clatter of her heels ceased beyond a
slammed door, he stood where she had left him between the two mirrors. In one of these he looked at a
thin man in shabby, mismatched clothes, with high, evaporating temples beneath an untidy mist of fine,
thin, unruly hair. It had never <remain> suffered ordering, though it was 6 years since <Belle> his wife Belle
had ceasing worrying him about preparations for it. They had been married for 10 years; 7 years ago he had
built the new house, the stucco bungalow.

<It seemed to be [illegible]. It seemed to be [illegible] now. They lived in> <In Kinston it was 10 degrees warmer than
in Jefferson, with that vivid, unimpeded heat of flat lands which lie with a quality of furious suspense even
[under?] the cold [moon?]. Belle had chosen Kinston because the flat, furious land engendered money out of
the black, rich, foul, unchaste soil which spread for 5,000 square miles without any hill save a few>