On the desk sat a photograph in a silver frame. Within the frame <Little Belle's> the soft, small face mused in sweet chiaroscuro. He
looked at it quietly, wondering at what age a man ceases to believe he must support a certain figure before even the
women at whose young intimacies he has made one: counsellor, handmaiden, and friend. Upon the silence there
still seemed to be the reverberant finality of the slammed door, and he thought of Little Belle beyond it, lying face-down
on the bed probably, in that romantic despair, that dramatic self-pity of the young.

The house was quiet. There was no sound save <the> a clash of metal, the slip-slop of feet on a bare floor where a negro
woman in unlaced gymnasium shoes went about getting dinner, the same dinner he had been eating for 10 years:
only the cook was different, one of a now anonymous succession, who were not Belle's husbands. He crossed the
room to a bookcase and took from it a dog-eared volume and put it into his pocket. From the desk he took a
pipe and a tobacco pouch. Then he tried to slip the photograph into his inside breast pocket, but it was too [large?]
He worked it out of the frame and it went in. From the closet in his room he took a disreputable hat of brown
felt, and left the house. When he was clear from town he put the hat into his pocket too, so that the sun could
reach his thinning skull.

That night he was lying in a bed of sawdust at a sawmill 26 miles away, still telling himself that all he wanted
was a hill to lie on for a while, thinking how even at 43 a man still believes he must support a certain
figure in the world before all women who were not begotten with him and whom he did not beget. Just a
hill, he said, toying with that lie, turning it and turning it on his tongue until it wore away, like a bon-bon, until <he
didn't even have to swallow> there wasn't even enough to swallow. Then he began to think of the house in
Jefferson 34 miles away, letting himself go into the thought with that profound relaxation of sense which is the pre-
cursor of sleep, of the <wisteria> gladioli now in bloom upon the lawn and of the wisteria along the white eaves
in thick, twisted ropes, thicker than a man's wrist, forgetting that that was 10 years ago.

Later, though still aware of the black sky cold with stars severed half overhead by a flat shed and 2 thin
joists, he was talking to her. They were talking of their father and mother, then he was telling her that he had been
dead 10 years. She did not reply at once. She merely mused above him with that quality of utter and de-
tached finality with which women instinctively <[still?]> sift man's folly down to the infinitesimal <grain
of impossible and [illegible] kernal of impossible <hope an> longing and desire; so still, that he said,