CHAPTER 12At the top of the curving stairway I stopped a moment. The door of Phyllis’s empty room was closed. The polished floor in front of it was scuffed and clouded from unaccustomed feet. I had a sudden pang of the most acute loneliness. Phyllis, half flower and half poison, always to be coped with, to keep either half from running wild in the garden of my life, was gone, and there was a bare mangled spot where nothing could ever grow again. All the times I could gladly have cut her throat, all the times I had depended on her and she on me to the utmost of friendship, from our perambulators in Rittenhouse Square to…to this, came surging back to me.
I crossed blindly to the blue room and closed the door, turned off the light and went and sat in the open window looking out over the gard
