that just at this particular time I do not owe them any money, but a year from now I may be in debt to that institution up to my eyebrows. There have been times, in the years I have lived and worked as a manufacturer, when I was altogether in the power of the men who now sit at desks behind those stone walls. Why they didn't close me up and take my business away from me I don't know. Perhaps they did not think it worth while and then, perhaps, they felt, if they left me on there I would be working for them anyway. At any rate now, it doesn't seem to matter much what such an institution as a bank may decide to do.
"One can't quite make out what other men think. Perhaps they do not think at all.
"If I come right down to it I suppose I've never done much thinking myself. Perhaps the whole business of life, here in this town and everywhere else, is just a kind of accidental affair. Things happen. People are swept along, eh? That's the way it must be."
It was incomprehensible to him and his mind soon grew weary of trying to think further along that road.
It went back to the matter of people and houses. Perhaps one could speak of that matter to Natalie. There was something simple and clear about her. "She has been working for me for three years now and it is strange I've never thought much about her before. She has a way of keeping things clear and straight. Everything has gone better since she has been with me."
It would be a thing to think about if all the time, since she had been with him, Natalie had understood the things that were just now becoming a little plain to him. Suppose, from the very beginning, she had been ready to have him go within herself. One could get quite romantic about the matter if one allowed oneself to think about it.
There she would be, you see, that Natalie. She got out of bed in the morning and while she was there, in her own room, in the little frame house out at the edge of town, she said a little prayer of some kind. Then she walked along the streets and down along the railroad tracks to her work and to sit all day in the presence of a man.
It was an interesting thought, just to suppose, as a kind of playful diversion let us say, that she, that Natalie, was pure and clean.
In that case she wouldn't be thinking much of herself. She loved, that is to say she had opened the doors of herself.
One had a picture of her standing with the doors of her body
