Just this last giving-in.  This one.  To be rested and fresh for him to-morrow.  Then never again.  The little beaded hand bag.  O God! help me!  That burning ache to rest and to uncurl of nervousness.  All the thousand thousand little pores of her body, screaming each one to be placated.  They hurt the entire surface of her.  That great storm at sea in her head; the crackle of lightning down that arm—­

“Let me see—­Circassian walnut—­baby grand—­” The pores demanding, crying—­shrieking—­

It was then that Carrie Samstag, even in her lovely pink nightdress a crone with pain, and the cables out dreadfully in her neck, began by infinitesimal processes to swing herself gently to the side of the bed, unrelaxed inch by unrelaxed inch, softly and with the cunning born of travail.

It was actually a matter of fifteen minutes, that breathless swing toward the floor, the mattress rising after her with scarcely a whisper and her two bare feet landing patly into the pale-blue room slippers, there beside the bed.

Then her bag, the beaded one on the end of the divan.  The slow, taut feeling for it and the floor that creaked twice, starting the sweat out over her.

It was finally after more tortuous saving of floor creaks and the interminable opening and closing of a door that Carrie Samstag, the beaded bag in her hand, found herself face to face with herself in the mirror of the bathroom medicine chest.

She was shuddering with one of the hot chills.  The needle and little glass piston out of the hand bag and with a dry little insuck of breath, pinching up little areas of flesh from her arm, bent on a good firm perch, as it were.

There were undeniable pockmarks on Mrs. Samstag’s right forearm.  Invariably it sickened her to see them.  Little graves.  Oh! oh! little graves!  For Alma.  Herself.  And now Louis.  Just once.  Just one more little grave—­

And Alma, answering her somewhere down in her heartbeats:  “No, mamma.  No, mamma!  No!  No!  No!”

But all the little pores gaping.  Mouths!  The pinching up of the skin.  Here, this little clean and white area.

“No, mamma!  No, mamma!  No!  No!  No!”

“Just once, darling?” Oh—­oh—­little graves for Alma and Louis.  No!  No!  No!

Somehow, some way, with all the little mouths still parched and gaping and the clean and quite white area unblemished, Mrs. Samstag found her back to bed.  She was in a drench of sweat when she got there and the conflagration of neuralgia, curiously enough, was now roaring in her ears so that it seemed to her she could hear her pain.

Her daughter lay asleep, with her face to the wall, her flowing hair spread in a fan against the pillow and her body curled up cozily.  The remaining hours of the night, in a kind of waking faint she could never find the words to describe, Mrs. Samstag, with that dreadful dew of her sweat constantly out over her, lay with her twisted lips to the faint perfume of that fan of Alma’s flowing hair, her toes curling in and out.  Out and in.  Toward morning she slept.  Actually, sweetly, and deeply, as if she could never have done with deep draughts of it.