Esther received him on the terrace. She had been there for hours, anxiously watching the spectacle from afar, then waiting for him to come and tell her what the outcome was. But he did not have to tell her. She knew by his look, by his walk, by the way he took her arm. They sat for some time in silence.
“It beats me,” he said. “I can’t explain it. I don’t know what happened.”
“What was it like?” she asked. “The product I mean—was it iron or steel?”
“Pot metal,” he said contemptuously.
For a long time they stood there on the terrace looking their thoughts into space. Hers were personal. His were not. This she knew. There is probably no sense of loneliness so poignant as that which a woman feels when the idol of her being disembodies his soul and departs with it, leaving in her hands the fact of his empty presence. Lacking in herself his power of abstraction she cannot understand this phenomenon. But she verifies it and it fills her with terror. The form is there at her side, even in her arms, as it was a moment before. The man is gone. She has no idea where he is or what he is doing.
“Aaron!”
Esther whispered his name as one who dreads to wake the sleeper and yet cannot forbear to do so. Impulsively she buried her face beneath his arm as if she would enter the vacant premises. He laid his arm around her shoulder. It was an absent gesture. She had not waked him quite.
“Aaron!” she called again. “What does it matter? Come back to me.”
At that he started slightly and began to talk in a slow, far-away manner, very much as he had talked to Enoch that moonlight night after the birthday party when the idea of making New Damascus an iron town had suddenly crystallized in his mind. Esther, loving the mere sound of his voice, did not at first get the sense of his speech. He was saying:
“Out there in unlimited space are the unborn....”