Book 3. The Adjustment - Chapter 5. Bitterness

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_ BOOK III. THE ADJUSTMENT CHAPTER V. BITTERNESS

In the night, after a restless sleep, she awoke in terror. A hundred incidents, a hundred phrases, looks, gestures, which she had thought meaningless until last evening, flashed out of the darkness and hung there, blazing, against the background of the night. Yesterday these things had appeared purposeless; and now it seemed to her that only her incredible blindness, only her childish inability to face any painful fact until it struck her between the eyes, had kept her from discovering the truth before it was thrust on her by the idle chatter of strangers. A curious rigidity, as if she had been suddenly paralyzed, passed from her heart, which seemed to have ceased beating, and crept through her limbs to her motionless hands and feet. Though she longed to call out and awaken Oliver, who, complaining of insomnia, spent the night in the adjoining room, this immobility, which was like the graven immobility of death, held her imprisoned there as speechless and still as if she lay in her coffin. Only her brain seemed on fire, so pitilessly, so horribly alive had it become.

From the street beyond the dim square of the window, across which the curtains were drawn, she could hear the ceaseless passing of carriages and motor cars; but her thoughts had grown so confused that for a long while, as she lay there, chill and rigid under the bed-clothes, she could not separate the outside sounds from the tumult within her brain. "Now that I know the truth I must decide what is best to do," she thought quite calmly. "As soon as this noise stops I must think it all over and decide what is best to do." But around this one lucid idea the discordant roar of the streets seemed to gather force until it raged with the violence of a storm. It was impossible to think clearly until this noise, which, in some strange way, was both in the street outside and within the secret chambers of her soul, had subsided and given place to the quiet of night again. Then gradually the tempest of sound died away, and in the midst of the stillness which followed it she lived over every hour, every minute, of that last evening when it had seemed to her that she was crucified by Oliver's triumph. She saw him as he came towards her down the shining corridor, easy, brilliant, impressive, a little bored by his celebrity, yet with the look of vital well-being, of second youth, which separated and distinguished him from the curious gazers among whom he moved. She saw him opposite to her during the long dinner, which she could not eat; she saw him beside her in the car which carried them to the theatre; and clearer than ever, as if a burning iron had seared the memory into her brain, she saw him lean on the railing of the box, with his eyes on the stage where Margaret Oldcastle, against the lowered curtain, smiled her charming smile at the house. It had been a wonderful night, and through it all she had felt the iron nails of her crucifixion driven into her soul.

Breaking away from that chill of terror with which she had awakened, she left the bed and went over to the window, where she drew the heavy curtains aside. In Fifth Avenue the electric lights sparkled like frost on the pavement, while beyond the roofs of the houses the first melancholy glow of a winter's sunrise was suffusing the sky with red. While she watched it, a wave of unutterable loneliness swept over her--of that profound spiritual loneliness which comes to one at dawn in a great city, when knowledge of the sleeping millions within reach seems only to intensify the fact of individual littleness and isolation. She felt that she stood alone, not merely in the world, but in the universe; and the thought that Oliver slept there in the next room made more poignant this feeling, as though she were solitary and detached in the midst of limitless space. Even if she called him and he came to her, she could not reach him. Even if he stood at her side, the immeasurable distance between them would not lessen.

When the morning came, she dressed herself in her prettiest gown, a violet cloth, with ruffles of old lace at the throat and wrists; but this dress, of which she had been so proud in Dinwiddie that she had saved it for months in order to have it fresh for New York, appeared somehow to have lost its charm and distinction, and she knew that last evening had not only destroyed her happiness, but had robbed her of her confidence in the taste and the workmanship of Miss Willy. Knowledge, she saw now, had shattered the little beliefs of life as well as the large ones.

Oliver liked to breakfast in his dressing-gown, fresh from his bath and eager for the papers, so when he came hurriedly into the sitting-room, the shining tray was already awaiting him, and she sat pouring his coffee in a band of sunlight beside the table. This sunlight, so merciful to the violet gown, shone pitilessly on the darkened hollows which the night had left under her eyes, and on the little lines which had gathered around her bravely smiling mouth.

"It was a wonderful success, all the papers say so, Oliver," she said, when he had seated himself at the other end of the table and taken the coffee from her hand, which shook in spite of her effort.

"Yes, it went off well, there's no doubt of it," he answered cheerfully, so cheerfully that for a minute a blind hope shot trembling through her mind. Could it all have been a dream? Was there some dreadful mistake? Would she presently discover that she had imagined that night of useless agony through which she had passed?

"The audience was so sympathetic. I saw a number of women crying in the last act when the heroine comes back to her old home."

"It caught them. I thought it would. It's the kind of thing they like."

He opened a paper as he spoke, and seeing that he wanted to read the criticisms, she broke his eggs for him, and then turning to her own breakfast tried in vain to swallow the piece of toast which she had buttered. But it was useless. She could not eat; she could not even drink her coffee, which had stood so long that it had grown tepid. A feeling of spiritual nausea, beside which all physical sensations were as trivial and meaningless as the stinging of wasps, pervaded her soul and body, and choked her, like unshed tears, whenever she tried to force a bit of food between her trembling lips. All the casual interests with which she filled her days, those seemingly small, yet actually tremendous interests without which daily life becomes almost unlivable, flagged suddenly and died while she sat there. Nothing mattered any longer, neither the universe nor that little circle of it which she inhabited, neither life nor death, neither Oliver's success nor the food which she was trying to eat. This strange sickness which had fallen upon her affected not only her soul and body, but everything that surrounded her, every person or object at which she looked, every stranger in the street below, every roof which she could see sharply outlined against the glittering blue of the sky. Something had passed out of them all, some essential quality which united them to reality, some inner secret of being without which the animate and the inanimate alike became no better than phantoms. The spirit which made life vital had gone out of the world. And she felt that this would always be so, that the next minute and the next year and all the years that came afterwards would bring to her merely the effort of living--since Life, having used her for its dominant purpose, had no further need of her. Once only the thought occurred to her that there were women who might keep their own even now by fighting against the loss of it, by passionately refusing to surrender what they could no longer hold as a gift. But with the idea there came also that self-knowledge which told her that she was not one of these. The strength in her was the strength of passiveness; she could endure, but she could not battle. Long ago, as long ago as the night on which she had watched in the shadow of death beside Harry's bed, she had lost that energy of soul which had once flamed up in her with her three days' jealousy of Abby. It was her youth and beauty then which had inspirited her, and she was wise enough to know that the passions which become youth appear ridiculous in middle-age.

Having drunk his coffee, Oliver passed his cup to her, and laid down his paper.

"You look tired, Virginia. I hope it hasn't been too much for you?"

"Oh, no. Have you quite got over your headache?"

"Pretty much, but those lights last night were rather trying. Don't put any cream in this time. I want the stimulant."

"Perhaps it has got cold. Shall I ring for fresh?"

"It doesn't matter. This will do quite as well. Have you any shopping that you would like to do this morning?"

Shopping! When her whole world had crumbled around her! For an instant the lump in her throat made speech impossible; then summoning that mild yet indestructible spirit, which was as the spirit of all those generations of women who lived in her blood, she answered gently:

"Yes, I had intended to buy some presents for the girls."

"Then you'd better take a taxicab for the morning. I suppose you know the names of the shops you want to go to?"

"Oh, yes. I know the names. Are you going to the theatre?"

"I've got to change a few lines in the play, and the sooner I go about it the better."

"Then don't bother about me, dear. I'll just put on my long coat over this dress and go out right after breakfast."

"But you haven't eaten anything," he remarked, glancing at her plate.

"I wasn't hungry. The fresh air will do me good. It has turned so much warmer, and the snow is all melting."

As she spoke, she rose from the table and began to prepare herself for the street, putting on the black hat with the ostrich tip and the bunch of violets on one side, which didn't seem just right since she had come to New York, and carefully wrapping the ends of her fur neck-piece around her throat. It was already ten o'clock, for Oliver had slept late, and she must be hurrying if she hoped to get through her shopping before luncheon. While she dressed, a wan spirit of humour entered into her, and she saw how absurd it was that she should rush about from shop to shop, buying things that did not matter in order to fill a life that mattered as little as they did. To her, whose mental outlook had had in it so little humour, it seemed suddenly that the whole of life was ridiculous. Why should she have sat there, pouring Oliver's coffee and talking to him about insignificant things, when her heart was bursting with this sense of something gone out of existence, with this torturing realization of the irretrievable failure of love?

Taking up her muff and her little black bag from the bureau, she looked back at him with a smile as she turned towards the door.

"Good-bye. Will you be here for luncheon?"

"I'm afraid I can't. I've an appointment down-town, but I'll come back as early as I can."

Then she went out and along the hall to the elevator, in which there was a little girl, who reminded her of Jenny, in charge of a governness in spectacles. She smiled at her almost unconsciously, so spontaneous, so interwoven with her every mood was her love for children; but the little girl, being very proper for her years, did not smile back, and a stab of pain went through Virginia's heart.

"Even children have ceased to care for me," she thought.

At the door, where she waited a few minutes for her taxicab, a young bride, with her eyes shining with joy, stood watching her husband while he talked with an acquaintance, and it seemed to Virginia that it was a vision of her own youth which had risen to torment her. "That was the way I looked at Oliver twenty-five years ago," she said to herself; "twenty-five years ago, when I was young and he loved me." Then, even while the intolerable pain was still in her heart, she felt that something of the buoyant hopefulness of that other bride entered into her and restored her courage. A resolution, so new that it was born of the joyous glance of a stranger, and yet so old that it seemed a part of that lost spirit of youth which had once carried her in a wild race over the Virginian meadows, a resolution which belonged at the same time to this other woman and to herself, awoke in her and mingled like a draught of wine with her blood. "I will not give up," she thought. "I will go to her. Perhaps she does not know--perhaps she does not understand. I will go to her, and everything may be different." Then her taxicab was called, and stepping into it, she gave the name not of a shop, but of the apartment house in which Margaret Oldcastle lived.

It was one of those February days when, because of the promise of spring in the air, men begin suddenly to think of April. The sky was of an intense blue, with little clouds, as soft as feathers, above the western horizon. On the pavement the last patches of snow were rapidly melting, and the gentle breeze which blew in at the open window of the cab, was like a caressing breath on Virginia's cheek. "It must be that she does not understand," she repeated, and this thought gave her confidence and filled her with that unconquerable hope of the future without which she felt that living would be impossible. Even the faces in the street cheered her, for it seemed to her that if life were really what she had believed it to be last night, these men and women could not walk so buoyantly, could not smile so gaily, could not spend so much thought and time on the way they looked and the things they wore. "No, it must have been a mistake, a ghastly mistake," she insisted almost passionately. "Some day we shall laugh over it together as we laughed over my jealousy of Abby. He never loved Abby, not for a minute, and yet I imagined that he did and suffered agony because of it." And her taxicab went on merrily between the cheerful crowds on the pavements, gliding among gorgeous motor cars and carriages drawn by high-stepping horses and pedlers' carts drawn by horses that stepped high no longer, among rich people and poor people, among surfeited people and hungry people, among gay people and sad people, among contented people and rebellious people--among all these, who hid their happiness or their sorrow under the mask of their features, her cab spun onward bearing her lightly on the most reckless act of her life.

At the door of the apartment house she was told that Miss Oldcastle could not be seen, but, after sending up her card and waiting a few moments in the hall before a desk which reminded her of a gilded squirrel-cage, she was escorted to the elevator and borne upward to the ninth landing. Here, in response to the tinkle of a little bell outside of a door, she was ushered into a reception room which was so bare alike of unnecessary furniture and of the Victorian tradition to which she was accustomed, that for an instant she stood confused by the very strangeness of her surroundings. Then a charming voice, with what sounded to her ears as an affected precision of speech, said: "Mrs. Treadwell, this is so good of you!" and, turning, she found herself face to face with the other woman in Oliver's life.

"I saw you at the play last night," the voice went on, "and I hoped to get a chance to speak to you, but the reporters simply invaded my dressing-room. Won't you sit here in the sunshine? Shall I close the window, or, like myself, are you a worshipper of the sun?"

"Oh, no, leave it open. I like it." At any other moment she would have been afraid of an open window in February; but it seemed to her now that if she could not feel the air in her face she should faint. With the first sight of Margaret Oldcastle, as she looked into that smiling face, in which the inextinguishable youth was less a period of life than an attribute of spirit, she realized that she was fighting not a woman, but the very structure of life. The glamour of the footlights had contributed nothing to the flame-like personality of the actress. In her simple frock of brown woollen, with a wide collar of white lawn turned back from her splendid throat, she embodied not so much the fugitive charm of youth, as that burning vitality over which age has no power. The intellect in her spoke through her noble rather than beautiful features, through her ardent eyes, through her resolute mouth, through every perfect gesture with which she accompanied her words. She stood not only for the elemental forces, but for the free woman; and her freedom, like that of man, had been built upon the strewn bodies of the weaker. The law of sacrifice, which is the basic law of life, ruled here as it ruled in mother-love and in the industrial warfare of men. Her triumph was less the triumph of the individual than of the type. The justice not of society, but of nature, was on her side, for she was one with evolution and with the resistless principle of change. Vaguely, without knowing that she realized these things, Virginia felt that the struggle was useless; and with the sense of failure there awoke in her that instinct of good breeding, that inherited obligation to keep the surface of life sweet, which was so much older and so much stronger than the revolt in her soul.

"You were wonderful last night. I wanted to tell you how wonderful I thought you," she said gently. "You made the play a success--all the papers say so this morning."

"Well, it was an easy play to make successful," replied the other, while a fleeting curiosity, as though she were trying to explain something which she did not quite understand, appeared in her face and made it, with its redundant vitality, almost coarse for an instant. "It's the kind the public wants, you couldn't help making it go."

The almost imperceptible conflict which had flashed in their eyes when they met, had died suddenly down, and the dignity which had been on the side of the other woman appeared to have passed from her to Virginia. This dignity, which was not that of triumph, but of a defeat which surrenders everything except the inviolable sanctities of the spirit, shielded her like an impenetrable armour against both resentment and pity. She stood there wrapped in a gentleness more unassailable than any passion.

"You did a great deal for it and a great deal for my husband," she said, while her voice lingered unconsciously over the word. "He has told me often that without your acting he could never have reached the position he holds."

Then, because it was impossible to say the things she had come to say, because even in the supreme crises of life she could not lay down the manner of a lady, she smiled the grave smile with which her mother had walked through a ruined country, and taking up her muff, which she had laid on the table, passed out into the hall. She had let the chance go by, she had failed in her errand, yet she knew that, even though it cost her her life, even though it cost her a thing far dearer than life--her happiness--she could not have done otherwise. In the crucial moment it was principle and not passion which she obeyed; but this principle, filtering down through generations, had become so inseparable from the sources of character, that it had passed at last through the intellect into the blood. She could no more have bared her soul to that other woman than she could have stripped her body naked in the market-place.

At the door her cab was still waiting, and she gave the driver the name of the toy shop at which she intended to buy presents for Lucy's stepchildren. Though her heart was breaking within her, there was no impatience in her manner when she was obliged to wait some time before she could find the particular sort of doll for which Lucy had written; and she smiled at the apologetic shopgirl with the forbearing consideration for others which grief could not destroy. She put her own anguish aside as utterly in the selection of the doll as she would have done had it been the peace of nations and not a child's pleasure that depended upon her effacement of self. Then, when the purchase was made, she took out her shopping list from her bag and passed as conscientiously to the choice of Jenny's clothes. Not until the morning had gone, and she rolled again up Fifth Avenue towards the hotel, did she permit her thoughts to return to the stifled agony within her heart.

To her surprise Oliver was awaiting her in their sitting-room, and with her first look into his face, she understood that he had reached in her absence a decision against which he had struggled for days. For an instant her strength seemed fainting as before an impossible effort. Then the shame in his eyes awoke in her the longing to protect him, to spare him, to make even this terrible moment easier for him than he could make it alone. With the feeling, a crowd of memories thronged through her mind, as though called there by that impulse to shield which was so deeply interwoven with the primal passion of motherhood. She saw Oliver's face as it had looked on that spring afternoon when she had first seen him; she saw it as he put the ring on her hand at the altar; she saw it bending over her after the birth of her first child; and then suddenly his face changed to the face of Harry, and she saw again the little bed under the hanging sheet and herself sitting there in the faintly quivering circle of light. She watched again the slow fall of the leaves, one by one, as they turned at the stem and drifted against the white curtains of the window across the street.

"Oliver," she said gently, so gently that she might have been speaking to her sick child, "would you rather that I should go back to Dinwiddie to-night?"

He did not answer, but, turning away from her, laid his head down on his arm, which he had outstretched on the table, and she saw a shiver of pain pass through his body as if it had been struck a physical blow. And just as she had put herself aside when she bought the doll, so now she forgot her own suffering in the longing to respond to his need.

"I can take the night train--now that I have seen the play there is no reason why I should stay. I have got through my shopping."

Raising his head, he looked up into her face. "Whatever happens, Virginia, will you believe that I never wanted to hurt you?" he asked.

For a moment she felt that the strain was intolerable, and a fear entered her mind lest she should faint or weep and so make things harder than they should be able to bear.

"You mean that something must happen--that there will be a break between us?" she said.

Leaving the table, he walked to the window and back before he answered her.

"I can't go on this way. I'm not that sort. A generation ago, I suppose, we should have done it--but we've lost grip, we've lost endurance." Then he cried out suddenly, as if he were justifying himself: "It is hell. I've been in hell for a year--don't you see it?"

After his violence, her voice sounded almost lifeless, so quiet, so utterly free from passion, was its quality.

"As long as that--for a year?" she asked.

"Oh, longer, but it has got worse. It has got unendurable. I've fought--God knows I've fought--but I can't stand it. I've got to do something. I've got to find a way. You must have seen it coming, Virginia. You must have seen that this thing is stronger than I am."

"Do--do you want her so much?" and she, who had learned from life not to want, looked at him with the pity which he might have seen in her eyes had he stabbed her.

"So much that I'm going mad. There's no other end to it. It's been coming on for two years--all the time I've been away from Dinwiddie I've been fighting it."

She did not answer, and when, after the silence had grown oppressive, he turned back from the window through which he had been gazing, he could not be sure that she had heard him. So still she seemed that she was like a woman of marble.

"You're too good for me, that's the trouble. You've been too good for me from the beginning," he said.

Unfastening her coat, which she had kept on, she laid it on the sofa at her back, and then put up her hands to take out her hatpins.

"I must pack my things," she said suddenly. "Will you engage my berth back to Dinwiddie for to-night?"

He nodded without speaking, and she added hastily, "I shan't go down again before starting. But there is no need that you should go to the train with me."

At this he turned back from the door where he had waited with his hand on the knob. "Won't you let me do even that?" he asked, and his voice sounded so like Harry's that a sob broke from her lips. The point was so small a one--all points seemed to her so small--that her will died down and she yielded without protest. What did it matter--what did anything matter to her now?

"I'll send up your luncheon," he added almost gratefully. "You will be ill if you don't eat something."

"No, please don't. I am not hungry," she answered, and then he went out softly, as though he were leaving a sick-room, and left her alone with her anguish--and her packing.

Without turning in her chair, without taking off her hat, from which she had drawn the pins, she sat there like a woman in whom the spirit has been suddenly stricken. Beyond the window the perfect day, with its haunting reminder of the spring, was lengthening slowly into afternoon, and through the slant sunbeams the same gay crowd passed in streams on the pavements. On the roof of one of the opposite houses a flag was flying, and it seemed to her that the sight of that flag waving under the blue sky was bound up forever with the intolerable pain in her heart. And with that strange passivity of the nerves which nature mercifully sends to those who have learned submission to suffering, to those whose strength is the strength, not of resistance, but of endurance, she felt that as long as she sat there, relaxed and motionless, she had in a way withdrawn herself from the struggle to live. If she might only stay like this forever, without moving, without thinking, without feeling, while she died slowly, inch by inch, spirit and body.

A knock came at the door, and as she moved to answer it, she felt that life returned in a slow throbbing agony, as if her blood were forced back again into veins from which it had ebbed. When the tray was placed on the table beside her, she looked up with a mild, impersonal curiosity at the waiter, as the dead might look back from their freedom and detachment on the unreal figures of the living. "I wonder what he thinks about it all?" she thought vaguely, as she searched in her bag for his tip. "I wonder if he sees how absurd and unnecessary all the things are that he does day after day, year after year, like the rest of us? I wonder if he ever revolts with this unspeakable weariness from waiting on other people and watching them eat?" But the waiter, with his long sallow face, his inscrutable eyes, and his general air of having petrified under the surface, was as enigmatical as life.

After he had gone out, she rose from her untasted luncheon, and going into her bedroom, took the black brocaded gown off the hanger and stuffed the sleeves with tissue paper as carefully as if the world had not crumbled around her. Then she packed away her wrapper and her bedroom slippers and shook out and folded the dresses she had not worn. For a time she worked on mechanically, hardly conscious of what she was doing, hardly conscious even that she was alive. Then slowly, softly, like a gentle rain, her tears fell into the trunk, on each separate garment as she smoothed it and laid it away.

At half-past eight o'clock she was waiting with her hat and coat on when Oliver came in, followed by the porter who was to take down her bags. She knew that he had brought the man in order to avoid all possibility of an emotional scene; and she could have smiled, had her spirit been less wan and stricken, at this sign of a moral cowardice which was so characteristic. It was his way, she understood now, though she did not put the thought into words, to take what he wanted, escaping at the same time the price which nature exacts of those who have not learned to relinquish. Out of the strange colourless stillness which surrounded her, some old words of Susan's floated back to her as if they were spoken aloud: "A Treadwell will always get the thing he wants most in the end." But while he stabbed her, he would look away in order that he might be spared the memory of her face.

Without a word, she followed her bags from the room without a word she entered the elevator, which was waiting, and without a word she took her place in the taxicab standing beside the curbstone. There was no rebellion in her thoughts, merely a dulled consciousness of pain, like the consciousness of one who is partially under an anaesthetic. The fighting courage, the violence of revolt, had no part in her soul, which had been taught to suffer and to renounce with dignity, not with heroics. Her submission was the submission of a flower that bends to a storm.

As she sat there in silence, with her eyes on the brilliant street, where the signs of his play stared back at her under the flaring lights, she began to think with automatic precision, as though her brain were moved by some mechanical power over which she had no control. Little things crowded into her mind--the face of the doll she had bought for Lucy's stepchild that morning, the words on one of the electric signs on the top of a building they were passing, the leopard skin coat worn by a woman on the pavement. And these little things seemed to her at the moment to be more real, more vital, than her broken heart and the knowledge that she was parting from Oliver. The agony of the night and the morning appeared to have passed away like a physical pang, leaving only this deadness of sensation and the strange, almost unearthly clearness of external objects. "It is not new. It has been coming on for years," she thought. "He said that, and it is true. It is so old that it has been here forever, and I seem to have been suffering it all my life--since the day I was born, and before the day I was born. It seems older than I am. Oliver is going from me. He has always been going from me--always since the beginning," she repeated slowly, as if she were trying to learn a lesson by heart. But so remote and shadowy did the words appear, that she found herself thinking the next instant, "I must have forgotten my smelling-salts. The bottle was lying on the bureau, and I can't remember putting it into my bag." The image of this little glass bottle, with the gold top, which she had left behind was distinct in her memory; but when she tried to think of the parting from Oliver and of all that she was suffering, everything became shadowy and unreal again.

At the station she stood beside the porter while he paid the driver, and then entering the doorway, they walked hurriedly, so hurriedly that she felt as if she were losing her breath, in the direction of the gate and the waiting train. And with each step, as they passed down the long platform, which seemed to stretch into eternity, she was thinking: "In a minute it will be over. If I don't say something now, it will be too late. If I don't stop him now, it will be over forever--everything will be over forever."

Beside the night coach, in the presence of the conductor and the porter, who stood blandly waiting to help her into the train, she stopped suddenly, as though she could not go any farther, as though the strength which had supported her until now had given way and she were going to fall. Through her mind there flashed the thought that even now she might hold him if she were to make a scene, that if she were to go into hysterics he would not leave her, that if she were to throw away her pride and her self-respect and her dignity, she might recover by violence the outer shell at least of her happiness. How could he break away from her if she were only to weep and to cling to him? Then, while the idea was still in her mind, she knew that to a nature such as hers violence was impossible. It took passion to war with passion, and in this she was lacking. Though she were wounded to the death, she could not revolt, could not shriek out in her agony, could not break through that gentle yet invincible reticence which she had won from the past.

Down the long platform a child came running with cries of pleasure, followed by a man with a red beard, who carried a suitcase. As they approached the train, Virginia entered the coach, and walked rapidly down the aisle to where the porter was waiting beside her seat.

For the first time since they had reached the station Oliver spoke. "I am sorry I couldn't get the drawing-room for you," he said. "I am afraid you will be crowded"; and this anxiety about her comfort, when he was ruining her life, did not strike either of them, at the moment, as ridiculous.

"It does not matter," she answered; and he put out his hand.

"Good-bye, Virginia," he said, with a catch in his voice.

"Good-bye," she responded quietly, and would have given her soul for the power to shriek aloud, to overcome this indomitable instinct which was stronger than her personal self.

Turning away, he passed between the seats to the door of the coach, and a minute later she saw his figure hurrying back along the platform down which they had come together a few minutes ago. _

Read next: Book 3. The Adjustment: Chapter 6. The Future

Read previous: Book 3. The Adjustment: Chapter 4. Life's Cruelties

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