THERE was a certain place in her bedroom between the desk and the bed in which Mrs. Stewart once in a while found herself standing stock-still, watching scenes from novels through the window panes. It was just as a moment ago, when she had been crossing the room to put a book away, and then had had suddenly to reacquaint herself with herself once again, standing like that, turned slightly into the plain white light from the window, gazing and gazing, her other senses in abeyance. The coolness of the boards against her bare heels, a chill almost, traveling up the backs of her ankles to the bend of her knees, had finally relocated her as she was, and only then had she accounted for the panorama laid out before her: an impersonal view of her neighbors as she stared from her high window over the flat village. The glass panes imposed themselves upon the squares of rich, plowed earth that were her neighbors' gardens. They seemed queerly, this morning, to be her own domain entirely, laid out as they were so accessible to her eye. This did not seem to be a place in which she lived but a place seen only through a window. Her own history she held off to herself in parentheses, as it were, rooted somewhere farther south. But now, this was not hers, this raw village in the Midwest, where the weather came sailing in so abruptly, where in the evenings if she went out for a stroll she felt the lightness of the air as a rebuke; it would not envelope her in soft, sweet dampness.