<bumps of earth which the Indians built to stand on when the River overflowed.>

<An hour later he was 2 miles from town, walking, with a book in one pocket and a photograph of Little Belle
in the other, carrying a disreputable felt hat in his hand so that the May sunlight should reach his thinning
skull. In shabby, mismatched>

[margin: In the window the curtains stirred [faintly?], blowing in and out of the sunlight in alter-
nate fire and ash; he could smell locust on the breeze, burning along the air almost like that of full summer.]

<He and Belle> <The road ran straight across the flat land, already refulgent with a heat like that of full sum-
mer.>
[margin: <shimmering away into mirage>]
It was 10 degrees warmer than in Jefferson, with that vivid, unimpeded heat of flat lands
[margin: across which roads ran like plumb-lines into shimmering mirage and which lie]
with a quality of furious suspense even under the cold moon. Belle had chosen Kinston because <furious monotonous> <the land
engendered money out of> the black, rich, foul, <monotonous> <monotonous> unchaste soil seemed to engender money out of the
very air, spreading in furious monotony for 5,000 square miles without any hill save a few bumps of earth
Indians had built to stand on when the River overflowed.

Once she had not been so keen about money. That was with Harry Mitchell, who never pretended to
offer her anything but money; who would have given it to anybody else that asked for it; who had to
build pools and tennis courts and a new car twice a year to get rid of what Belle had been too
inert, <discontent, bemused> richly bemused in discontent, to spend. That was in 1919, when people
were growing a little weary of having to spend money, and Horace with . . . . . . what? Sometimes he thought it
had been because Harry insisted on calling her Little Mother in public, sometimes because it <annoyed her to
see a> flouted her ego to see a man's emotional life apparently fixed upon a woman of whom he could
not desire – not gain – physical satisfaction in return.

"Dont talk to me about love," she said, her <eyes t> eyelids smoldering, her mouth full and rich, lying in a wicker
chair while Harry scuttled back and forth across the tennis court, applauding all shots in his harsh,
jarring voice; "you're in love with your sister. What do the books call it? What sort of complex?"

"Not complex," he said. "Do you think any relation with her could be complex?" A woman for whom
even luck, life, simplified itself. <3> 4 months after his return from the war she married a man whom
anyone could have told was doomed, who carried his fatality about with him, whom she had known
all her life without have said 4 words to or thought of half that many times save with serene and aston-
ished distaste; 3 months after the wedding she was deserted, <pregnant>; 8 months later she was a mother
and a widow.

"Call it what you like," Belle said. "How did she come to let you go to the war, even in the Y.M.C.A?"

"I did the next best thing," he said. "I came back."

"Yes," Belle said. "To her. Not to me."

"Isn't one man at a time enough for you?"

"Yes. And that wont be again, Horace. Do you hear? I dont need a lover. <It took the war to show
me that> Even though it did take a war to show me that."

"Did it last long enough to make you sure of that?"

She looked at him, smoldering, comtemplative, relaxed in her chair. "Your impossible hair," she said.
She said, "So you hope one man is enough for her, too, do you?" He said nothing. "That is, if you're
the man, "of course." She looked at him beneath her slow eyelids. "Horace, what are you going to
do when she marries? What will you do on the night a man makes — " He rose quickly,
catching up his racket.

"I'm going to play a set," he said.