“We have eaten a great deal, my friend, against the day of God.”

She was a fine woman, hard, magnificent, cold, Russian, married to a Jew, a doctor on the East Side.

You know that kind of woman, pale, large, with a heavy oval face.

A woman of ‘material’—a lasting personality, in other words, a ‘fashionable’ woman, a woman who, had she lived to the age of forty odd, would have sat for long fine hours by some window, overlooking some desolate park, thinking of a beautiful but lazy means to an end.

She always wore large and stylish hats, and beneath them her mouth took on a look of pain at once proud, aristocratic and lonely.

She had studied medicine—but medicine in the interest of animals; she was a good horse doctor—an excellent surgeon on the major injuries to birds and dogs.

In fact she and her husband had met in a medical college in Russia—she had been the only woman in the class, the only one of the lot of them who smiled in a strange, hurt and sarcastic way when dissecting.

The men treated her like one of them, that is, they had no cringing mannerliness about their approach, they lost no poise before her, and tried no tricks as one might say.

The Silverstaffs had come to America, they had settled on the East Side, among ‘their own people’ as he would say; she never said anything when he talked like this, she sat passive, her hands in her lap, but her nostrils quivered, and somewhere under the skin of her cheek something trembled.

Her husband was the typical Jewish intellectual, a man with stiff, short, greying hair, prominent intelligent and kindly eyes, rather short, rather round, always smelling of Greek salad and carbolic acid, and always intensely interested in new medical journals, theories, discoveries.

He was a little dusty, a little careless, a little timid, but always gentle.

They had been in America scarcely eight months before the first child was born, a girl, and then following on her heels a boy, and then no more children.

Katrina Silverstaff stopped having her children as abruptly as she had begun having them; something complicated had entered her mind, and where there are definite complications of the kind that she suffered, there are no more children.

“We have eaten a great deal, my friend, against the day of God,” she had said that.

She had said that one night, sitting in the dusk of their office. There was something inexpressibly funny in their sitting together in this office, with its globe of the world, its lung charts, its weighing machine, its surgical chair, and its bowl of ineffectual goldfish. Something inexpressibly funny and inexpressibly fecund, a fecundity suppressed by coldness, and a terrible determination—more terrible in that her husband Otto felt nothing of it.

He was very fond of her, and had he been a little more sensitive he would have been very glad to be proud of her. She never became confidential with him, and he never tried to overstep this, partly because he was unaware of it, and partly because he felt little need of a closer companionship.

She was a fine woman, he knew that; he never thought to question anything she did, because it was little, nor what she said, because it was less; there was an economy about her existence that simply forbade questioning. He felt in some dim way, that to criticize at all would be to stop everything.

Their life was typical of the East Side doctor’s life. Patients all day for him, and the children for her, with an occasional call from someone who had a sick bird. In the evening they would sit around a table with just sufficient food, with just sufficient silver and linen, and one luxury: Katrina’s glass of white wine.

Or sometimes they would go out to dine, to some kosher place, where everyone was too friendly and too ugly and too warm, and here he would talk of the day’s diseases while she listened to the music and tried not to hear what her daughter was crying for.

He had always been a ‘liberal,’ from the first turn of the cradle. In the freedom of the people, in the betterment of conditions, he took the interest a doctor takes in seeing a wound heal.

As for Katrina Silverstaff, she never said anything about it, he never knew what she really thought, if she thought at all; it did not seem necessary for her to do or say anything, she was fine as she was, where she was. On the other hand it never occurred to him that she would not hear, with calmness at least, his long dissertations on capital.

At the opening of this story, Katrina’s daughter was a little girl of ten, who was devoted to dancing, and who lay awake at nights worrying about the shape of her legs, which had already begun to swell with a dancer’s muscles.

The boy was nine, thin, and wore spectacles.

And of course what happened was quite unaccountable.

A man, calling himself Castillion Rodkin, passed through one Summer, selling Carlyle’s “French Revolution.” Among the houses where he had left a copy was the house of Otto Silverstaff.

Katrina had opened the door, the maid was down with the measles, and the doctor was busy with a patient, a Jew much revered for his poetry.

She never bought anything of peddlers, and she seldom said more than “No, thank you.” In this case she neither said “Thank you,” nor closed the door—instead she held it open, standing a little aside for him to pass, and, utterly astonished, he did pass, waiting behind her in the hall for orders.

“We will go into the study,” she said, “my husband is busy.”

“I was selling Bibles last year,” he remarked, “but they do not go down in this section.”

“Yes,” she answered, “I see,” and she moved before him into the heavy damp parlour which was never unshuttered and which was never used. She reached up and turned on one solitary electric light.

Castillion Rodkin might have been of any nationality in the world; this was partly from having travelled in all countries, and also from a fluid temperament—little was fixed or firm in him, a necessary quality in a salesman.

Castillion Rodkin was below medium height, thin and bearded with a pale, almost white growth of hair. He was peculiarly colourless, his eyes were only a shade darker than his temples, and very restless.

She said simply, “We must talk about religion.”

And with an awkwardness unusual to him he asked “Why?”

“Because,” she said in a strained voice, making a hurt gesture, “it is so far from me.”

He did not know what to say, of course, and lifting one thin leg in its white trousers he placed it carefully over the other.

She was sitting opposite him, her head turned a little to one side, not looking at anything. “You see,” she said presently, “I want religion to become out of the reach of the few.”

“Become’s a queer word,” he said.

“It is the only word,” she answered, and there was a slight irritation in her voice, “because it is so irrevocably for the many.”

“Yes,” he said mechanically, and reached up to his beard, leaving his hand there under a few strands of hair.

“You see,” she went on simply, “I can come to the point. For me, everything is a lie—I am not telling this to you because I need your help, I shall never need help,” she said, turning her eyes on his, “understand that from the beginning——”

“Beginning,” he said in a loud voice suddenly.

“From the beginning,” she repeated calmly, “right from the very start, not help but hindrance, I need enough hindrance, a total obstacle, otherwise I cannot accomplish it.”

“Accomplish what, madame?” he asked and took his hand from under his beard.

“That is my affair, mine alone, that you must not question, it has nothing to do with you, you are only a means to an end.”

He said, “What can I do for you?”

She smiled, a sudden smile, and under her cheek something flickered. “You can do nothing,” she said and stood up. “I must always do it all—yes, I shall be your mistress—wait,” she said raising her hand, and there was anger and pride in her. “Do not intrude now by word or sign, but tomorrow you will come to me—that is enough—that is all you can do,” and in this word “all” he felt a limit on himself that he had never known before, and he was frightened and disquieted and unhappy.

He came the next day, cringing a little, fawning, uneasy, and she would not see him—she sent word “I do not need you yet,” and he called again the next day and learned that she was out of town, then one Sunday she was in to him.

She said quietly to him, as if she were preparing him for a great disappointment, “I have deliberately, very deliberately, removed remorse from the forbidden fruit,” and he was abject suddenly and trembling.

“There will be no thorns for you,” she went on in a cold abrupt voice. “You will miss that, but do not presume to show it in my presence.”

“Also my floor is not the floor on which you may crawl,” she continued, “and I do not permit you to suffer while I am in the room—and,” she added, unfastening her brooch slowly and precisely, “I dislike all spiritual odours.”

“Are we all strange?” he whispered.

“It takes more than will to attain to madness.”

“Yes.”

Then she was silent for a while, thinking.

“I want to suffer,” he murmured, and trembled again.

“We are all gross at times, but this is not your time.”

“I could follow you into the wilderness.”

“I would not miss you.”

And it was said in a terrible forbidding voice.

“I suffer as a birthright—I want it to be something more my own than that.”

“What are you going to do?” he said.

“Does one ever destroy oneself who is utterly disinterested?”

“I don’t know.”

Presently she said, “I love my husband—I want you to know that, it doesn’t matter, but I want you to know that, and that I am content with him, and quite happy——”

“Yes,” Castillion Rodkin answered and began trembling again, holding on to the sides of the bed.

“But there is something in me,” she continued, “that is very mournful because it is being.”

He could not answer and tears came to his eyes.

“There is another thing,” she said with abrupt roughness, “that I must insist on, that is that you will not insult me by your presence while you are in this room.”

He tried to stop his weeping now, and his body grew tense, abject.

“You see,” she continued, “some people drink poison, some take a knife, and others drown; I take you.”

In the very early dawn, she sat up with a strange smile. “Will you smoke?” she said, and lit him a cigarette. Then she withdrew into herself, sitting on the edge of the mahogany boards, her hands in her lap.

And there was a little ease, and a little comfort in Castillion Rodkin, and he turned, drawing up one foot, thrusting his hand beneath his beard, slowly smoking his cigarette.

“Does one regret?” he asked, and the figure of Katrina never moved, nor did she seem to hear.

“You know, you frightened me—last night,” he went on, lying on his back now and looking at the ceiling. “I almost became something—something.”

There was a long silence.

“Shall the beasts of the field and the birds of the air forsake thee?” he said gloomily, then brightly. “Shall any man forsake thee?”

Katrina Silverstaff remained as she was, but under her cheek something quivered.

The dawn was very near and the street lamps had gone out; a milk cart rattled across the square, and passed up a side street.

“One out of many, or only one?”

He put his cigarette out, he was beginning to breathe with difficulty, he was beginning to shiver.

“Well——”

He turned over, got up, stood on the floor.

“Is there nothing I can say?” he began, and went a little away and put his things on.

“When shall I see you again?”

And now a cold sweat broke out on him, and his chin trembled.

“Tomorrow?”

He tried to come toward her, but he found himself near the door instead.

“I’m nothing,” he said, and turned toward her, bent slightly; he wanted to kiss her feet—but nothing helped him.

“You’ve taken everything now, now I cannot feel, I do not suffer——” He tried to look at her—and succeeded finally after a long time.

He could see that she did not know he was in the room.

Then something like horror entered him, and with a soft, swift running gait he reached the door, turned the handle and was gone.

A few days later, at dusk, for his heart was the heart of a dog, he came into Katrina’s street, and looked at the house.

A single length of crape, bowed, hung at the door.

From that day he began to drink heavily, he got to be quite a nuisance in the cafÉs, he seldom had money to pay, he was a fearless beggar, almost insolent, and once when he saw Otto Silverstaff sitting alone in a corner, with his two children, he laughed a loud laugh and burst into tears.