open. Something constantly went out of her and into the man in whose presence she spent the day. He was unaware, was in fact too much absorbed in his affairs to be aware.
Her own self also began to be absorbed with his affairs, to take the load of small and unimportant details of business off his mind in order that he in turn become aware of her, standing thus, with the doors of her body opened. How clean, sweet, and fragrant the house within which she lived. Before one went within such a house one would have to cleanse oneself too. That was clear. Natalie had done it with prayers and devotion, single-minded devotion to the interests of another. Could one cleanse one's own house that way? Could one be as much the man as Natalie was the woman? It was a test.
As for the matter of houses—if one got thinking of his own body in that way where would it all end. One might go further and think of his own body as a town, a city, as the world.
It was a road to madness too. One might think of people constantly passing in and out of each other. In all the world there would be no more secrecy. Something like a great wind would sweep through the world.
"One had better go a little slow and not get himself out of hand," he told himself.
He went and sat on a bench in a little park in the very centre of his town and began trying to think along another road. Across a little stretch of grass and a roadway before him there was a store with trays of fruit, oranges, apples, grapefruits, and pears arranged on the sidewalk and now a wagon stopped at the store door and began to unload other things. He looked long and hard at the wagon and at the store front.
His mind slipped off at a new tangent. There he was, himself, John Webster, sitting on that bench in a park in the very heart of a town in the state of Wisconsin. It was fall and nearly time for frost to come, but there was still new life in the grass. How green the grass was in the little park! The trees were alive too. Soon now they would flame with colour and then sleep for a period. To all the world of living green things there would come the flame of evening and then the night of winter.
Out before the world of animal life the fruits of the earth would be poured. Out of the ground they would come, off trees and bushes, out of the seas, lakes, and rivers, the things that were to maintain
