The latter question was ultimately decided by his remaining under his grandfather’s roof.  November found him back in the office again, in fairly good health, with an outer skin of indifference slowly forming over his lacerated soul.  There had been a hard minute to live through when he came back to his old brown room in Washington Square.  The walls and tables were covered with photographs of Undine:  effigies of all shapes and sizes, expressing every possible sentiment dear to the photographic tradition.  Ralph had gathered them all up when he had moved from West End Avenue after Undine’s departure for Europe, and they throned over his other possessions as her image had throned over his future the night he had sat in that very room and dreamed of soaring up with her into the blue...

It was impossible to go on living with her photographs about him; and one evening, going up to his room after dinner, he began to unhang them from the walls, and to gather them up from book-shelves and mantel-piece and tables.  Then he looked about for some place in which to hide them.  There were drawers under his book-cases; but they were full of old discarded things, and even if he emptied the drawers, the photographs, in their heavy frames, were almost all too large to fit into them.  He turned next to the top shelf of his cupboard; but here the nurse had stored Paul’s old toys, his sand-pails, shovels and croquet-box.  Every corner was packed with the vain impedimenta of living, and the mere thought of clearing a space in the chaos was too great an effort.

He began to replace the pictures one by one; and the last was still in his hand when he heard his sister’s voice outside.  He hurriedly put the portrait back in its usual place on his writing-table, and Mrs. Fairford, who had been dining in Washington Square, and had come up to bid him good night, flung her arms about him in a quick embrace and went down to her carriage.

The next afternoon, when he came home from the office, he did not at first see any change in his room; but when he had lit his pipe and thrown himself into his arm-chair he noticed that the photograph of his wife’s picture by Popple no longer faced him from the mantel-piece.  He turned to his writing-table, but her image had vanished from there too; then his eye, making the circuit of the walls, perceived that they also had been stripped.  Not a single photograph of Undine was left; yet so adroitly had the work of elimination been done, so ingeniously the remaining objects readjusted, that the change attracted no attention.

Ralph was angry, sore, ashamed.  He felt as if Laura, whose hand he instantly detected, had taken a cruel pleasure in her work, and for an instant he hated her for it.  Then a sense of relief stole over him.  He was glad he could look about him without meeting Undine’s eyes, and he understood that what had been done to his room he must do to his memory and his imagination:  he must so readjust his mind that, whichever way he turned his thoughts, her face should no longer confront him.  But that was a task that Laura could not perform for him, a task to be accomplished only by the hard continuous tension of his will.