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meeting of all members of the same secret league at the same times of day to discuss their common interests, while it gradually elevated that meeting in order to observe others, that eternal drawing of comparisons, to the entire meaning of its existence. Once isolated and thrown on its own resources, a life so used to casual social intercourse loses any fixed point, the senses rebel without their usual diet of very mild but indispensable stimulation, and solitude degeneratesinto a kind of nervous self-animosity. Irene felt time weighing endlessly down on her, and without her usual occupations the passing hours lost all their point. She paced up and down the rooms of her apartment as if she were in a dungeon, both idle and agitated. The street and the society world that were her real life were barred to her. The blackmailer stood there with her threat, like the angel with the fiery sword.
    Her children were the first to notice this change in her, particularly the elder child, her little boy, who expressed his surprise that Mama was at home so often with embarrassing clarity, while the servants whispered to each other and exchanged surmises with the governess. Irene tried in vain to devise all kinds of necessary reasons, some of them very ingenious, for her conspicuous presence, but in itself the artificial nature of her explanations showed her how years of indifference had made her unnecessary in her own family circle. Whenever she tried to do something actively useful she came up against the interests of others, who resisted her sudden attempts as an intrusion on their own customary rights. There was no place left for her; for lack of contact with it she herself had become a foreign body in the organism of her own household. She did not know what to do with herself and her time, and even her approaches to the children failed, for they suspected that her sudden lively interest in them meantthe introduction of a new kind of discipline, and she felt herself blush in shame when, during one of her attempts to look after them, her seven-year-old son asked outright why she wasn’t going for so many walks these days. Wherever she tried to lend a helping hand she was disrupting an established order, and when she showed an interest she merely aroused suspicion. And she lacked the skill to make her constant presence less obtrusive by cleverly keeping in the background and staying quietly in a single room, with a single book or performing a single task. Her private fear, turning as all her strong feelings did to nervous strain, hunted her from one room to another. She jumped every time the telephone or the doorbell rang, and kept catching herself looking out into the street from behind net curtains, hungry for other people, or at least the sight of them, longing for freedom, and yet full of fear that suddenly, among all the passing faces, she might see the one face that followed her into her dreams staring up at her. She felt that her quiet existence was suddenly disintegrating, melting away, and this sense of helplessness was giving rise to a presentiment that her life was entirely ruined. These three days in the dungeon of her rooms at home seemed longer to her than all her eight years of marriage.
    However, she and her husband had accepted an invitation for the evening of the third day weeks ago,and it was impossible for her to back out suddenly now without giving very good reasons. What was more, the invisible bars of horror that had built up around her life must be broken down some time if she was not to be utterly destroyed. She needed people around her, a couple of hours’ rest from her own company, from the suicidal loneliness of fear. Then again, where would she be better protected than in a strange house and surrounded by friends, where would she be safer from the invisible persecution dogging her footsteps? She shuddered just for a second, the brief second when she actually stepped out of the house, venturing into the street