PARTISAN
REVIEW
283
was a robber an all. I thought everything would go as I planned.
With us doing the bens and making all we could on the sale of the
cinders. After all, I was only asking for things to stay the way they
always had till you quit dealing and until we began. But now . . ."
Her voice broke and she looked up at the ceiling.
"But now?" Ellen Simms asked, and into the pause that came
she sat up straight on her chair and her lips and square white teeth
clamped down hard on the stem of the pipe in her mouth. Annie
shook her head, and I guessed that with her now it was more a
matter of feelings than of facts or words she was finding it difficult
to explain.
"I feel bunched," she said finally. And the sounds in the room
and outside in the lane were mingled, and in the summer evening
long drawn. Her glance roped in me and Ellen Simms and the
room. "I feel suddenly bet," she said. "Like I've lost the full use of
my head or something. I mean . . ." She started again, but Ellen
Simms cut her short.
"I know what you mean," she said. "But you can't afford to
feel bunched or bet."
"Maybe not, but I do just the same, with the way things have
been going," Annie said. "I'm sick at the very sameness of the days
because lately every single day is filled with downright bad luck or
with things just going contrary. And yet," she added and paused, "at
the same time everything is changing, if you know what I mean."
"I know what you mean," Ellen Simms said, and the smoke
from her pipe was beginning to lie bitter and warm and stagnant
in the room. "I also know there's just no such thing as sameness,"
she said. "It just looks that way sometimes."
"How do you mean?" Annie asked.
"What I say," Ellen Simms said. "Maybe we do the same
things every day and even go back over the same ground. And
perhaps we may even have the same contentious, vexing, and sad–
making thoughts, but inside where you can't see them, things are
changing all the time - working themselves up into a state where
they all come together like peas in a pod and finally show. Then
before you know where you are you're saying something's happened
and your life is so different you can't believe it's your own."
"Yes, that's it," Annie said when Ellen Simms paused and let
her hand with the pipe in it rest on the edge of the table. "One day
