She went quickly but very softly up the creaking back stairway. Her breath was choking and guilty. She remembered where Laurie kept his pistol, and she passed into his room and fumbled in the bureau drawer among his clothes.
When she had the pistol in her hand, suddenly, she felt sure of herself.
She did not want to do it now. Not that night.
She was ashamed of having left the dining-room, and decided to go downstairs once more.
Before she went, she carried the pistol to her room and hid it.
She felt calm. For the first time, it seemed as if her whole body was hers, as in a love embrace. She was not afraid of understanding it. She rested in relief, in intimacy with herself. Nothing separated her from herself.
Alice threw a gray woolen bathrobe about her over her nightgown, and went downstairs to get the morning paper.
Sunlight came over the transom of the street door and blue motes floated down a spreading ladder of light. The light and the whirling motes sank into the soft dingy nap of the carpet as into a vortex. There was a deep spot of radiance, putty colored, like a pool of dust, still in the gloom.
Alice opened the door and took the paper in.