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waste-receptacle. "Wonder if I'll be able to smoke openly, once I'm home?" She shrugged. "Oh well, there's always the back of the barn."
                    And then suddenly she had reverted to their mutual condition again.
                    "Are you frightened? About it , you know?"
                    Helen made the admission with her eyes.
                    "I am too." She took a reflective puff. "I think everyone is, a little, don't you? Men don't think we are. All I have to do is look at Hugh--" she deepened the dimple-pits humorously--"and I can see he's frightened enough for the two of us, so then I don't let on that I'm frightened too. And I reassure him ."
                    Helen wondered what it was like to have someone to talk to about it
                    "Are they pleased about it?"
                    "Oh sure. They're tickled silly. First grandchild, you know. They didn't even ask us if we wanted to come back. 'You're coming back,' and that was that."
                    She pointed the remnant of her cigarette down toward one of the taps, quenched it with a sharp little jet of water.
                    "Ready? Shall we go back to our seats now?"
                    They were both doing little things. All life is that, the continuous doing of little things, all life long. And then suddenly a big thing strikes into their midst--and where are the little things, what became of them, what were they?
                    Her hand was to the door, reversing the little handlatch that Patrice had locked before, when they first came in. Patrice was somewhere behind her, replacing something in the uplidded dressing-kit, about to close it and bring it with her. She could see her vaguely in the chromium sheeting lining the wall before her. Little things. Little things that life is made up of. Little things that stop--
                    Her senses played a trick on her. There was no time for them to synchronize with the thing that happened. They played her false. She had a fleeting impression, at first, of having done something wrong to the door, dislodged it in its entirety. Simply by touching that little hand-latch. It was as though she were bringing the whole door-slab down inward on herself. As though it were falling bodily out of its frame, hinges and all. And yet it never did, it never detached itself, it never came apart from the entire wall-section it was imbedded in. So the second fleeting impression, equally false and equally a matter of seconds only, was that the entire wall of the compartment, door and all, was toppling, threatening to come down on her. And yet that never did either. Instead, the whole alcove seemed to upend, shift on a crazy axis, so that what had been the wall before her until now, had shifted to become the ceiling over her; so that what had been the floor she was standing on until now, had shifted to become the wall upright before her. The door was gone hopelessly out of reach; was a sealed trap overhead, impossible to attain.
                    The lights went. All light was gone, and yet so vividly explosive were the sensory images whirling through her mind that they glowed on of their own incandescence in the dark; it took her a comparatively long time to realize she was steeped in pitch-blackness, could no longer see physically. Only in afterglow of imaginative terror.
                    There was a nauseating sensation as if the tracks, instead of being rigid steel rods, had softened into rippling ribbons, with the train still trying to follow their buckling curvature. The car seemed to go up and down, like a scenic railway performing foreshortened dips and rises that followed one another quicker and quicker and quicker. There was a distant rending, grinding, coming nearer, swelling as it came. It reminded her