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the telephone.
    Dr. Pietrich was not in, but his housemaid gave him the number of another doctor. The second doctor said he could be there in fifteen minutes.
    Twenty-five minutes went by, and Walter was in terror that she was going to cease breathing before his eyes, but the shallow breathing went on. The doctor arrived and went briskly to work with a stomach pump. Walter poured warm water for him into the funnel at one end of the tube. Nothing came out of her but the water, colored with a little bloody mucous. The doctor gave her two injections, then tried the pump again. Walter watched her half-open eyes, the limp unnatural-looking mouth, for any signs of consciousness. He saw none at all.
    â€œDo you think she’ll live?” he asked.
    â€œHow do I know?” the doctor said irritably. “She’s not waking up. She’ll have to go to the hospital.”
    Walter disliked the doctor intensely.
    A few moments later Walter carried Clara in his arms down the stairs and out to the car.
    Some of the doctors, Walter thought, acted as if it were most annoying that they had to bother with a suicide case. Or as if they assumed automatically that he was to blame.
    â€œEver had any trouble with her heart?” a doctor asked.
    â€œNo,” Walter said. “Do you think she’ll live?”
    The doctors eyebrows went up indifferently, and he continued to write in his tablet. “Depends on her heart,” the doctor said. He led the way down the corridor.
    She was lying under a transparent oxygen tent. The nurse was rubbing her arm for another injection, and Walter winced as the big needle slid two inches up her vein. Clara didn’t twitch.
    â€œShe’ll just either sleep it off or not,” the doctor said.
    Walter leaned over and studied Clara’s face intently. Her mouth was still lifeless, misshapen, lips slightly drawn back from her teeth. It gave her face an expression Walter had never seen before, an expression like that of death, he thought. He believed now that Clara didn’t want to live. And instead of her unconscious will working to live as a normal person’s would, he imagined her will pulling her towards death, and he felt helpless.
    By two in the morning there was no change in her condition, and Walter went home. He called the hospital at intervals, and the message was always “No change.” At about six in the morning he had a cup of coffee and a brandy and drove off to the hospital. Claudia came at seven, and he didn’t want to see her because he didn’t know what to tell her.
    Clara lay in exactly the same position. He thought her eyelids had swollen a little. There was something horribly fetuslike about the swollen eyelids and the expressionless mouth. The doctor told him that her blood pressure had decreased slightly, which was a bad sign, but so far as her heart went, she seemed to be holding her own.
    â€œDo you think she’ll live?”
    â€œI just can’t answer that question. She took enough to kill her, if you hadn’t brought her here. We should know in another forty-eight hours.”
    â€œForty-eight hours!”
    â€œThe coma could last even longer, but if it does I doubt if she’ll pull out.”
    Around nine o’clock Walter drove to New York. His suitcase was still in the back of the car, and he got his briefcase out of it before he went up to the office. It seemed to him that he had never intended to go to an hotel with the suitcase, that it was only a prop in his real intent to get out of the house in order to let Clara kill herself without his interference. Walter could not escape the fact that he had known she was going to take the pills. He could tell himself that he hadn’t really thought she would take them, because she hadn’t the other time, but this time had been different—and he knew it. In a sense, he thought, he had killed her—if she died. And therefore he thought he must have