He had no desire to know the woman who had, for the time at least, so broken up his life,—­no curiosity about her every-day personality.  He shunned any revelation of it, and he listened for Miss Bower’s coming and going, not to encounter, but to avoid her.  He wished that the girl who wore shirt-waists and got letters from Chicago would keep out of his way, that she did not exist.  With her he had naught to make.  But in a room full of sun, before an old mirror, on a little enchanted rug of sleeping colours, he had seen a woman who emerged naked through a door, and disappeared naked.  He thought of that body as never having been clad, or as having worn the stuffs and dyes of all the centuries but his own.  And for him she had no geographical associations; unless with Crete, or Alexandria, or Veronese’s Venice.  She was the immortal conception, the perennial theme.

The first break in Hedger’s lethargy occurred one afternoon when two young men came to take Eden Bower out to dine.  They went into her music room, laughed and talked for a few minutes, and then took her away with them.  They were gone a long while, but he did not go out for food himself; he waited for them to come back.  At last he heard them coming down the hall, gayer and more talkative than when they left.  One of them sat down at the piano, and they all began to sing.  This Hedger found absolutely unendurable.  He snatched up his hat and went running down the stairs.  Caesar leaped beside him, hoping that old times were coming back.  They had supper in the oysterman’s basement and then sat down in front of their own doorway.  The moon stood full over the Square, a thing of regal glory; but Hedger did not see the moon; he was looking, murderously, for men.  Presently two, wearing straw hats and white trousers and carrying canes, came down the steps from his house.  He rose and dogged them across the Square.  They were laughing and seemed very much elated about something.  As one stopped to light a cigarette, Hedger caught from the other: 

“Don’t you think she has a beautiful talent?”

His companion threw away his match.  “She has a beautiful figure.”  They both ran to catch the stage.

Hedger went back to his studio.  The light was shining from her transom.  For the first time he violated her privacy at night, and peered through that fatal aperture.  She was sitting, fully dressed, in the window, smoking a cigarette and looking out over the housetops.  He watched her until she rose, looked about her with a disdainful, crafty smile, and turned out the light.

The next morning, when Miss Bower went out, Hedger followed her.  Her white skirt gleamed ahead of him as she sauntered about the Square.  She sat down behind the Garibaldi statue and opened a music book she carried.  She turned the leaves carelessly, and several times glanced in his direction.  He was on the point of going over to her, when she rose quickly and looked up at the sky.  A flock of pigeons had risen from somewhere in the crowded Italian quarter to the south, and were wheeling rapidly up through the morning air, soaring and dropping, scattering and coming together, now grey, now white as silver, as they caught or intercepted the sunlight.  She put up her hand to shade her eyes and followed them with a kind of defiant delight in her face.