"You hadn't heard? Well, that proves, I reckon, that I can keep a

secret." He lurched to his feet, balanced himself unsteadily for an

instant, and then stumbled to the window. Beyond him she saw the black

shape of the box-bush, with a flutter of white turkeys among its boughs,

and overhead a triangle of sky, where the grey was washed into a

delicate blue. Yes, the storm was over.

"They ought to reach the station about now," he said. "When the windows

are open and the wind is in the right direction, you can hear the

whistle of the train." There was malignant pleasure in his tone. "You

didn't know, I s'pose, that he'd gone off to get married?"

"Married?" She laughed feebly, imagining that he intended a joke. How

dreadful old men were when they tried to be funny! His pointed beard

jerked up and down when he talked, and his little red blinking eyes

stared between his puffed eyelids like a rat's eyes out of a hole. Then

something as black and cold as stale soot floated out from the chimney

and enveloped her. She could scarcely get her breath. If only he would

open the windows.

"Hasn't he told you that we are to be married next week?" she asked.

"No, he hasn't told me." He gloated over the words as if they were

whiskey, and she wondered what he was like when he was not drinking, if

that ever happened. He could be open-handed, she had heard, when the

humour struck him. Once, she knew, he had helped Miss Texanna Snead

raise the money for her taxes, and when Aunt Mehitable's cow died he had

given her another. "I had a notion that you and he were sweethearts," he

resumed presently, "and he'd have to look far, I reckon, before he could

pick out a finer girl. He's a pleasant-tempered boy, is Jason, but he

ain't dependable, even if he is my son, so I hope you haven't set too

much store by him. I never heard of him mixing up with girls, except you

and Geneva. That ain't his weakness. The trouble with him is that he was

born white-livered. Even as a child he would go into fits if you showed

him a snake or left him by himself in the dark----"

"He loves me," she said stoutly, closing her ears and her mind to his

words.

He nodded. "I don't doubt it, I don't doubt it. He loved you well

enough, I reckon, to want to jilt Geneva; but he found out, when he

tried, that she wasn't as easy to jilt as he thought. He'd courted her

way back yonder last year, when they were in New York together. Later on

he'd have been glad to wriggle out of it; but when Jim and Bob Ellgood

came after him, he turned white-livered again. They took him off and

married him while he was still shaking from fright. A good boy, a

pleasant boy," continued the old man, smacking his dry lips, "but he

ain't of my kidney."

When he had finished, she gazed at him in a dumbness which had attacked

her like paralysis. She tried to cry out, to tell him that she knew he

lied; but her lips would not move in obedience to her will, and her

throat felt as if it were petrified. Was this the way people felt when

they had a stroke, she found herself thinking. On the surface she was

inanimate; but beneath, in the buried jungle of her consciousness, there

was the stirring of primitive impulses, and this stirring was agony. All

individual differences, all the acquired attributes of civilization, had

turned to wood or stone; yet the racial structure, the savage fibre of

instinct, remained alive in her.

The room had grown darker. Only the hearth and the evil features of the

old man were picked out by the wavering blue light. She saw his face,

with its short wagging beard and its fiery points of eyes, as one sees

objects under running water. Everything was swimming round her, and

outside, where a cloud had drifted over the triangle of clear sky, the

box-bush and the white turkeys were swimming too.

"You'll meet 'em on the road if you go by the fork," piped a voice

beneath that shifting surface. "They will be well on the way by the time

you have started."

Stung awake at last, she thrust out her arm, warding him off. The one

thought in her mind now was to escape, to get out of the room before he

could stop her, to put the house and its terrors behind her. It couldn't

be true. He was drunk. He was lying. He was out of his head. She was

foolish even to listen, foolish to let the lie worry her for an instant.

Turning quickly, she ran from him out of the room, out of the house, out

of the stagnant air of the place.

At the beginning of the sandy road, where the water had hollowed a

basin, she met the coloured woman, Idabella, who said "good evening,"

after the custom of the country, as she went by. She was a handsome

mulatto, tall, deep-bosomed, superb, and unscrupulous, with the regal

features that occasionally defy ethnology in the women of mixed blood.

Her glossy black hair was worn in a coronet, and she moved with the slow

and arrogant grace which springs from a profound immobility.

"The dreadful old man," thought Dorinda, as she hurried in the direction

of Gooseneck Creek. "The dreadful, lying old man!"

XIII

The sun had riddled the clouds, and a watery light drenched the trees,

the shrubs, and the bruised weeds. This light, which bathed the external

world in a medium as fluid as rain, penetrated into her thoughts, and

enveloped the images in her mind with a transparent brilliance.

"It isn't true," she repeated over and over, as she went down the sandy

slope to Gooseneck Creek, and over the bridge of logs in the willows.

When she reached the meadows, rain was still dripping from the

golden-rod and life-everlasting. A rabbit popped up from the briers and

scuttled ahead of her, with his little white tail bobbing jauntily.

"How funny it looks," she thought, "just as if it were beckoning me to

come on and play. The rain is over, but I am soaked through. Even my

skin is wet. I'll have to dry all my clothes by the kitchen fire, if it

hasn't gone out. What a terrible old man!" Out of nowhere there flashed

into her mind the recollection of a day when she had gone to a dentist

at the County Courthouse to have an aching tooth drawn. All the

way, sitting beside her father, behind Dan and Beersheba, she had kept

repeating, "It won't hurt very much." Strange that she should have

thought of that now! She could see the way Dan and Beersheba had turned,

flopping their ears, and looked round, as if they were trying to show

sympathy; and how the bunches of indigo, fastened on their heads to keep

flies away, had danced fantastically like uprooted bushes. "It isn't

true;" she said now, seeking to fortify her courage as she had tried so

passionately on the drive to the dentist. "When Jason comes back, we

will laugh over it together. He will tell me that I was foolish to be

worried, that it proved I did not trust him. But, of course, I trust

him. When we are married, I will stand between him and the old man as

much as I can. I am not afraid of him. No, I am not afraid," she said

aloud, stopping suddenly in the road as if she had seen a snake in her

path. "When Jason comes back, everything will be right. Yes, everything

will be right," she repeated. "Perhaps the old man suspected something,

and was trying to frighten me. Doctors always know things sooner than

other people. . . . What a dirty place it is! Ma would call it a pig sty.

Well, I can clean it up, bit by bit. Even if the old man doesn't let

anybody touch his den, I can clean the rest of the house. I'll begin

with the porch, and some day, when he is out, I can make Jemima wash

that dreadful floor and the window-panes. The outside is almost as bad

too. The walk looks as if it had never been swept." In order to deaden

this fear, which was gnawing at her heart like a rat, she began to plan

how she would begin cleaning the place and gradually bring system out of

confusion. "A little at a time," she said aloud, as if she were reciting

a phrase in a foreign language. "A little at a time will not upset him."

At the fork of the road, approaching the red gate, where the thick belt

of woods began, her legs gave way under her, and she knew that she could

go no farther. "I'll have to stop," she thought, "even if the ground is

so wet, I'll have to sit down." Then the unconscious motive, which had

guided her ever since she left Five Oaks, assumed a definite form. "If

he came on that train, he ought to be here in a few minutes," she said.

"The whistle blew a long time ago. Even if he waited for the mail, he

ought to be here in a little while."

Stepping over the briers into the woods, she looked about for a place to

sit down. An old stump, sodden with water, pushed its way up from the

maze of creepers, and she dropped beside it, while she relapsed into the

suspense that oozed out of the ground and the trees. As long as her

response to this secret fear was merely physical, she was able to keep

her thoughts fixed on empty mechanical movements; but the instant she

admitted the obscure impulse into her mind, the power of determination

seemed to go out of her. She felt weak, unstrung, incapable of rational

effort.

A thicket of dogwood and redbud trees made a close screen in front of

her, and through the dripping branches, she could see the red gate, and

beyond it the blasted oak and the burned cabin on the other side of the

road. Farther on, within range of her vision, there were the abandoned

acres of broomsedge, and opposite to them she imagined the Sneads'

pasture, with the white and red splotches of cows and the blurred

patches of huddled sheep.

While she sat there the trembling passed out of her limbs, and the

strength that had forsaken her returned slowly. Removing her hat, she

let the branches play over her face, like the delicate touch of cool,

moist fingers. She felt drenched without and within. The very thoughts

that came and went in her mind were as limp as wet leaves, and blown

like leaves in the capricious stir of the breeze. For a few minutes she

sat there surrounded by a vacancy in which nothing moved but the leaves

and the wind. Without knowing what she thought, without knowing even

what she felt, she abandoned herself to the encompassing darkness. Then,

suddenly, without warning from her mind, this vacancy was flooded with

light and crowded with a multitude of impressions.

Their first meeting in the road. The way he looked at her. His eyes when

he smiled. The red of his hair. His hand when he touched her. The

feeling of his arms, of his mouth on hers, of the rough surface of his

coat brushing her face. The first time he had kissed her. The last time

he had kissed her. No. It isn't true. It isn't true. Deep down in her

being some isolated point of consciousness, slow, rhythmic, monotonous,

like a swinging pendulum, was ticking over and over: It isn't true. It

isn't true. True. True. It isn't true. On the surface other thoughts

came and went. That horrible old man. A fire in summer. The stench of

drunkenness. Tobacco stains on his white beard. A rat watching her from

a hole. How she hated rats! Did he suspect something, and was he trying

to frighten her? Trying to frighten her. But she would let him see that

she was too strong for him. She was not afraid. . . . The thoughts went

on, coming and going like leaves blown in the wind, now rising, now

fluttering down again. But far away, in a blacker vacancy, the pendulum

still swung to and fro, and she heard the thin, faint ticking of the

solitary point of consciousness: _True. True. It isn't true. It isn't

true--true--true_--

No, he couldn't frighten her. She was too sure of herself. Too sure of

Jason, too sure of her happiness. "Too sure of Jason," she repeated

aloud.

The little sad, watery sun sputtered out like a lantern, and after a few

minutes of wan greyness, shone more clearly, as if it had been relighted

and hung up again in the sky. Colour flowed back into the landscape,

trickling in shallow streams of blue and violet through the nearer

fields and evaporating into dark fire where the broomsedge enkindled

the horizon. She started up quickly, and fell back. When she put her

hand on the slimy moss it felt like a toad.

Far down the road, somewhere in the vague blur of the distance, there

was the approaching rumble of wheels. She heard the even rise and fall

of the hoofs, the metallic clink of horseshoes striking together, the

jolting over the rock by the Sneads' pasture, the splash of mud in the

bad hole near the burned cabin, and the slip and scramble of the mare as

she stumbled and then, recovering herself, broke into a trot.

_It isn't true. It isn't true_, ticked the pin point of consciousness. Her

mind was still firm; but her limbs trembled so violently that she

slipped from the stump to the carpet of moss and soaked creepers.

Shutting her eyes, she held fast to the slimy branch of a tree. "When he

turns at the fork, I will look. I will not look until he turns at the

fork."

The rumble was louder, was nearer. An instant of silence. The buggy was

approaching the fork. It was at the fork. She heard close at hand the

familiar clink of the steel shoes and the sharper squeak of a loosened

screw in the wheel. Rising on the sodden mould, she opened her eyes,

pushed aside the curtain of branches, and looked out through the leaves.

She saw Jason sitting erect, with the reins in his hands. She saw his

burnished red hair, his pale profile, his slightly stooping shoulders,

his mouth which was closed in a hard straight line. Clear and sharp, she

saw him with the vividness of a flash of lightning, and beside him, she

saw the prim, girlish figure and the flaxen head of Geneva Ellgood.

_It isn't true. It isn't true._ The pendulum was swinging more slowly; and

suddenly the ticking stopped, and then went on in jerks like a clock

that is running down. _It isn't true. It isn't true--true--true._

She felt cold and wet. Though she had not lost the faculty of

recollection, she was outside time and space, suspended in ultimate

darkness. There was an abyss around her, and through this abyss wind was

blowing, black wind, which made no sound because it was sweeping through

nothingness. She lay flat in this vacancy, yet she did not fall through

it because she also was nothing. Only her hands, which clutched

wood mould, were alive. There was mould under her finger nails, and the

smell of wet earth filled her nostrils. Everything within her had

stopped. The clock no longer ticked; it had run down. She could not

think, or, if she thought, her thoughts were beyond her consciousness,

skimming like shadows over a frozen lake. Only the surface of her could

feel, only her skin, and this felt as if it would never be warm again.

"So it is true," she said aloud, and the words, spoken without a thought

behind them, startled her. The instant afterwards she began to come back

to existence; she could feel life passing through her by degrees, first

in her hands and feet, where needles were pricking, then in her limbs,

and at last in her mind and heart. And while life fought its way into

her, something else went out of her for ever--youth, hope, love--and the

going was agony. Her pain became so intolerable that she sprang to her

feet and started running through the woods, like a person who is running

away from a forest fire. Only she knew, while she ran faster and faster,

that the fire was within her breast, and she could not escape it. No

matter how far she ran and how fast, she could not escape it.

Presently the running shook her senses awake, and her thoughts became

conscious ones. In the silence the shuddering beats of her heart were

like the unsteady blows of a hammer--one, two, one, one, two, two. Her

breath came with a whistling sound, and for a minute she confused it

with the wind in the tree-tops.

"So this is the end," she said aloud, and then very slowly, "I didn't

know I could feel like this. I didn't know anybody could feel like

this." A phrase of her mother's, coloured with the barbaric imagery of a

Hebrew prophet, was driven, as aimlessly as a wisp of straw, into her

mind: "Your great-grandfather said he never came to Christ till he had

thirsted for blood." Thirsted for blood! She had never known what that

meant. It had seemed to her a strange way to come to Christ, but now she

understood.

The wet briers tore her legs through her stockings. Branches whipped her

face and bruised its delicate flesh. Once, when she came out of the

woods, she slipped and fell on her hands and knees. The splinters of the

fence pierced her skin when she climbed over the rails. But still she

ran on, trying to escape from the fire within her breast.

XIV

On the front porch, with her hand shielding her eyes from the sunset,

her mother stood and looked out for her.

"I was watching for you, Dorinda. You must have got caught in the

storm."

"Just at the beginning. I stopped at Five Oaks."

"Was anybody there?"

"Nobody but the old doctor. Jemima was off."

"Did he say when he expected Jason?"

"Yes, he told me he might come back this evening."

Once, long ago, she had heard a ventriloquist at a circus, and her voice

was like the voice that had come out of the chair, the table, or the wax

doll. As she stepped on the porch, her mother examined her closely.

"Well, you're as white as a sheet. Go up and take off your wet things as

quick as you can, and bring 'em down to the fire. Supper'll be ready in

a minute."

Dorinda tried to smile when she hurried by, but her muscles, she found,

eluded the control of her will, and the smile was twisted into a

smirking grimace. Without trusting herself to meet her mother's eyes,

she went upstairs to her room and took off her rain-soaked clothes,

hanging her skirt and shirtwaist in the closet, and putting her muddy

shoes side by side, as if they were standing at attention on the edge of

the rug. Pushing back the curtain over the row of hooks, she selected an

old blue gingham dress which she had discarded, and put it on, carefully

adjusting the belt, from which the hooks and eyes, were missing, with

the help of a safety pin. All the time, while she performed these

trivial acts, she felt that her intimate personal self had stepped

outside her body, and was watching her from a distance. When she went

downstairs, it was only a marionette, like one of the figures she had

seen as a child in a Punch and Judy show, that descended the stairs and

sat down at the table. She looked at her father and mother, her father

eating so noisily, her mother pouring buttermilk, without spilling a

drop, into the row of glasses, and wondered what she had to do with

these people? Why had she been born in this family and not in another?

Could she have been a changeling that they had picked up?

"Dorinda stopped at Five Oaks until the storm was over," she heard her

mother say to the others; and suddenly, as if the sound had touched some

secret spring in her mind, she became alive again, and everything was

bathed in the thin blue light of that room at Five Oaks. The pain was

more than she could bear. It was more than anybody could be expected to

bear. In a flash of time it became so violent that she jumped up from

her chair, and began walking up and down as if she were in mortal agony.

"What's the matter, daughter? Did you come down on your tooth?" inquired

Mrs. Oakley solicitously.

"No, it isn't that. I don't want any supper," replied the girl, hurrying

out of the room and walking the length of the hall to the front door. "I

must do something," she thought. "If I don't do something, this pain

will go on for ever."

She had crossed the threshold to the porch, when, wheeling abruptly, she

went back into the hall and from the hall into her mother's chamber,

where the family Bible lap open on the table and the big fly was still

knocking against the ceiling. She had not known that flies lived so

long! It seemed an eternity, not a few hours ago, when her mother had

sat there reading the Psalms and the fly had buzzed in the stillness.

The peaceful room, pervaded by the Sabbath lethargy, with the open Bible

waiting for family prayers, and the battered old furniture arranged in

changeless order, seemed to close over her like a trap. "I must do

something, or this misery will never end," she thought again. But there

was nothing that she could do. There would never be anything that she

could do in her life. It was over. Everything was over, and she might

live to be ninety. "And the child coming too." There also she could find

no escape. "No matter what I do, I can change nothing." Something had

caught her. Life had caught her. She could not get away, no matter how

hard she struggled. A drop of blood fell on her fingers, and glancing

into the mirror, she saw that she had bitten her lip until it bled, yet

she had not felt it. Nothing like that, nothing on the outside of

herself, could ever hurt her again. "If I could only do something," she

said in a whisper, and walked from the chamber to the spare room, and

from the spare room, which looked as if it were hiding something, out

into the hall. Suddenly, like a person moving in delirium, she walked

out of the house, and along the path between the pear orchard and the

vegetable garden. The green afterglow had faded; but a sallow moon was

riding high over the big pine, and gave light enough for her to see her

way. Like a wet sheet the twilight folded about her, clinging to her

arms and legs when she tried to shake herself free from it. She would

have moonlight in the woods, and besides she had nothing to fear. A dry

sob broke from her, hurting her throat. You had reached the worst, she

realized, when you had nothing to fear.

She followed the path rapidly. By the pear orchard, by the big pine on

the hill, by the tobacco field, through the pasture, and into the dark

belt of woods. Here the smell of wet earth stifled her, and she lived

over again the moment when she had waited there, listening, in the

suspense which was more terrible than any certainty. "I didn't know what

it was when I went through with it," she thought. "I didn't know what it

was until afterwards." Memory, she felt, was gathering like an ulcer in

her mind. If she could not let out the pain, the sore would burst from

its own swelling. "If I don't do something, I shall die," she said

aloud, standing there, on the edge of the woods, among the wet leaves

and rotting mould. Then, swift as an inspiration, there came to her the

knowledge of what she must do. She must find Jason. Yes, she must find

Jason. This knowledge, which was as infallible as instinct, went no

further than the imperative necessity of seeing him. Beyond this, the

impulse gave way, like a bridge that breaks in the middle of a stream.

It left her there, without prop, without direction, hanging over the

black current of emptiness.

As she hurried on, a bough struck her so sharply that it bruised her

cheek, but she did not feel it. With the act of decision her body had

become so airy and transparent that she was no longer conscious of it as

a drag on her spirit. Though she ought to have been tired, she felt

instead amazingly strong and fresh, amazingly full of vitality. Only now

and then, as she walked rapidly through the willows and over the log

bridge, lights flickered and vanished and flickered again before her

eyes. At first she thought that a million sparks glittered out there in

the moist purple twilight; then she realized that they were not there at

all but within her brain. And these lights, which flitted round her as

she went on, illumined the blind impulse that directed her movements. It

was as if she were harnessed to this impulse and driven by it toward

some end of which she was ignorant, but which she would presently

discern in the fog.

She moved quickly, with her gaze fixed straight in front of her. The

dusk was gilded with fireflies, but she could not distinguish these

vagrant insects from the roving lights in her brain. The earth underfoot

gave out, when it was crushed, a strong, warm, vital odour. Very near

and loud, there was the hoot of an owl, followed presently by another;

but the cries seemed to be a part of the inner voice which was urging

her on. Her feet slipped on the logs. She recovered herself and went on

more quickly, more lightly, as if her body did not exist, or existed

merely as a cloud. Now she could see the lamps glimmering in the lower

windows of the house. There were lights in the hall, in the dining room,

in the old doctor's retreat; but all the upstairs windows were dark

except for the reflected rays of the moonbeams. Was the old man still

crouching over his fire, she wondered, with his rat eyes watching out of

a hole?

Around the house there were puddles of water and the piles of trash that

she had seen in the afternoon. Like a fawn, she sped over them and

stopped, unaware of her panting breath, with her eyes on the back door,

which was open. She could see within the hall, where a kerosene lamp was

fastened in a bracket near the staircase. The same heaps of bagging and

boxes and empty bottles were scattered about; the same collection of

rusty guns and broken fishing-poles. For the first time she thought

clearly, while her gaze travelled over these ordinary objects, "Why did

I come? What is the meaning of it? Why am I waiting out here in the

night?" But there was no answer to her question. She could not remember

why she had come, why she was standing there alone, with her eyes on the

open door, watching. Vacancy was around her, was within her; she was

drowning in vacancy. Looking away from the house, she saw that there was

a light in the barn, and that the big musty place was deserted. The

buggy, from which the horse had been taken, was standing near the door,

and one of those formless thoughts which she could not distinguish from

feeling told her that Jason would come out to put it under the shed. "If

I wait here long enough, I shall see him." Though the words were spoken

outside her brain, she knew that she must wait there all night if he did

not come.

Stepping over the loosened boards of the threshold of the barn, she

glanced about at the disorder, which was like the disorder of the house,

only it seemed to her cleaner because it was less human. Wheat, corn,

fodder. Farming implements. A reaping machine. Medicine for stock. A

jumble of odds and ends that had been thrown out of a tool house.

Against a barrel by the door there was the gun with which the old doctor

had shot the hawk in the afternoon. Her hands moved over it caressingly,

wonderingly. A good gun, not rusty, like everything else on the place.

Jason's probably. Far away over the fields a voice was speaking, and the

sound floated to her, thin and clear as distant chimes. "_He never came

to Christ till he had thirsted for blood._" A strange way--but she knew

now, she understood.

There was a noise at the house. A figure darkened the lamplight

on the porch; she heard a familiar step; she saw a shadow

approaching. It was Jason, she knew, and as he came toward her, she left

the barn and went out into the moonlight to meet him. She felt calm now,

fresh, strong, relentless; but the ulcer in her mind throbbed as if it

were bursting. Yes, it was Jason. He was coming down the steps. He was

coming along the path to the barn. In a minute he would see her standing

there, another shadow in the moonlight. In a minute he would speak to

her.

Suddenly, while she stood there in silence, the gun went off in her

hands. She saw the flash; she heard the sound, as if the discharge were

miles away; she smelt the powder. The next instant she felt the tremor

of the shock as the weapon, recoiled in her hands; and she thought

quietly and steadily, "I tried to do it. I wanted to do it."

"Dorinda," he called out, while the smoke drifted past him, and she saw

his face go as white as paper in the dimness.

Then, as swiftly as it had come, her resolution went out of her. The gun

slipped from her hands to the ground, and lay there in the mud at her

feet. Her will, with all its throbbing violence, urged her to shoot him

and end the pain in her mind. But something stronger than her conscious

will, stronger than her agony, stronger than her hate, held her

motionless. Every nerve in her body, every drop of her blood, hated him;

yet because of this nameless force within the chaos of her being, she

could not compel her muscles to stoop and pick up the gun at her feet.

Like a dream, like a fantasy of delirium, her resolution vanished, and

she knew that it would not return. "Why am I here? What is the meaning

of it all?" she asked wildly of the emptiness within her soul.

"Dorinda!" he said again. He had seen her; he had called her name. They

were alone together in the moonlight as they had been when she loved

him. If only she had the power to stoop and pick up the gun! If only she

had the power to make her muscles obey the wish in her heart! If only

she had the power to thrust him out of her life! It was not love, it was

not tenderness, it was not pity even, that held her back. Nothing but

this physical inability to bring her muscles beneath the control of her

will.

"Dorinda!" he said again incoherently, as if he had been drinking. "So

you know. But you can't know all. Not what I've been through. Not what

I've suffered. Nobody could. It is hell. I tell you I've been through

hell since I left you. I never wanted to do it. You are the one I care

for. I never wanted to marry her. It was something I couldn't help. They

brought pressure on me that I couldn't bear. They made me do it. I was

engaged to her before I came back. It was in New York last summer. She

showed she liked me and it seemed a good thing. Then I met you. I didn't

want to marry her. Before God, Dorinda, I never meant to do it. But I

did it. You will never understand. I told you that I funked things. I

have ever since I can remember. It's the way my mother funked things

with my father. Well, I'm like that, so you oughtn't to blame me so

much. God knows I'd help it if I could. I never meant to throw you over.

It was their fault. They oughtn't to have brought that pressure to bear

on me. They oughtn't to have threatened me. They ought to have let me do

the best I could. Speak to me. Say something, Dorinda----"

He went on endlessly, overcome by the facile volubility of a weak

nature. Was it in time or in eternity that he was speaking? She thought

that he would never stop; but his words made as little impression on her

as the drip, drip of rain from the eaves. Nothing that he said made any

difference to her. Nothing that he could ever say in the future would

make any difference. In that instant, with a piercing flash of insight,

she saw him as he was, false, vain, contemptible, a coward in bone and

marrow. He had wronged her; he had betrayed her; he had trampled her

pride in the dust; and he had done these things not from brutality, but

from weakness. If there had been strength in his violence, if there had

been one atom of genuine passion in his duplicity, she might have

despised him less even while she hated him more. But weak, vain, wholly

contemptible as she knew him to be, she had given him power over her.

She had placed her life in his hands, and he had ruined it. With the

fury of a strong nature toward a weak one that has triumphed over it,

she longed to destroy him and she knew that she was helpless. Nothing

that she could do would alter a single fact in his future. Even now he

excused himself. Even now he blamed others.

"I swear I never meant to do it, Dorinda," he repeated more vehemently,

encouraged by her silence. "You won't give me up, will you?"

Thoughts wheeled like a flight of bats in her mind, swift, vague, dark,

revolving in circles. They were pressing upon her from every side, but

she could distinguish nothing clearly in the thick palpitating darkness.

Impressions skimmed so swiftly over her consciousness that they left no

visible outline. Before she was aware of them they had wheeled away from

her into ultimate chaos. Bats, nothing more. And outside, against the

lighted door of the barn, other bats were revolving.

While she stood there without thinking, her perceptions of external

objects became acutely alive. She saw Jason's face, chalk-white in the

moonlight; she saw the jerking of his muscles while he talked; she saw

his arm waving with a theatrical gesture, like the arm of an evangelist.

_Drip, drip_, like water from the eaves, she heard the fall of his words,

though the syllables were as meaningless as the rain or the wind.

She had not spoken since he approached her; and she realized, standing

there in the mud, that she was silent because she could find no words to

utter. There was no vehicle strong enough to endure the storm of pain

and bitterness in her mind. Dumbness had seized her, and though she

struggled to pour out all that she suffered, when she opened her lips to

speak, she could make no audible sound. No, there was nothing that she

could say, there was nothing that she could do.

"You won't give me up, will you, Dorinda?" he pleaded.

Turning away, she started back again as rapidly as she had come. Though

he called after her in a whisper, though he followed her as far as the

end of the yard, she did not slacken her pace or look back at him.

Swiftly and steadily, like a woman walking in her sleep, she went down

the narrow sandy road to the creek and over the bridge of logs. There

was a stern beauty in her face and in her tall, straight figure, which

passed, swiftly and unearthly as a phantom, through the moonlight. An

impulse was driving her again, but it was the impulse to escape from his

presence. She was flying now from the vision she had seen of his naked

soul.

She walked in the moonlight without seeing it; past the frogs in the

bulrushes without hearing them; through the moist woods without smelling

them. Time had stood still for her, space had vanished; there was no

beginning and no end to this solitary aching nerve of experience. She

was aware of nothing outside herself until she entered the house and saw

her mother's chamber, with the open Bible and the big blue fly, which

still buzzed against the ceiling.

"We're waiting prayers for you, Dorinda. Ain't you coming?"

"No, I'm not coming. I've got a headache."

"Why did you go out again?"

"I thought I heard a coon or something in the henhouse."

"It might make your head better to hear a chapter of the Bible."

"No, it won't. I'm not coming. I'm never coming to prayers again."

XV

In the morning she awoke with the feeling that she was lying under a

stone. Something was pressing on her, holding her down when she

struggled to rise, and while she came slowly back to herself, she

realized that this weight was the confused memory of all that had

happened. Yes, it was life. She was caught under it and she couldn't

escape.

So far only, her muscles had awakened. Sensation was returning by slow

degrees to her limbs; she could feel the quiver of despair in her knees

and elbows; but her mind was still drugged by the stupor of exhaustion.

Recollection was working its way upward to her brain. Deadened as she

was, it astonished her that her muscles should remember more accurately

than her mind, that they should record a separate impression. "Something

dreadful has happened," she found herself saying mechanically. "It will

all come back in a minute."

While she dragged herself out of bed, she tried to fix her thoughts on

insignificant details. Her shoes were still damp, and she changed them

for a pair her mother had given her a few weeks ago because they drew

her ankles. There was a broken lace. She must remember to buy a new one

at the store. Beyond the window she could see the orchard and the

graveyard, with the big pine on the hill, and farther away the shallow

ripples of the broomsedge. All these things seemed to her fantastic and

meaningless, as if they were painted on air. She recalled now what had

happened last evening; but this also appeared meaningless and unreal,

and she felt that the whole flimsy situation would evaporate at the

first touch of an actual event. She could remember now; but it was a

recollection without accompanying sensation, as inanimate as the

flitting picture cast by a lantern. Some, terrible mistake seemed to

have occurred to her. Just as if she had stepped, for a few dreadful

moments, into a life that was not her own. And all the past, when she

looked back upon it, wore this aspect of unreality. The world in which

she had surrendered her being to love--that world of spring meadows and

pure skies--had receded from her so utterly that she could barely

remember its outlines. By no effort of the imagination could she

recapture the ecstasy. Colours, sounds, scents, she could recall; the

pattern of the horizon; evening skies the colour of mignonette; the

spangled twilight over the bulrushes; but she could not revive a single

wave, a single faint quiver, of emotion. Never would it come back again.

The area of feeling within her soul was parched and blackened, like an

abandoned field after the broomsedge is destroyed. Other things might

put forth; but never again that wild beauty. Around this barren region,

within the dim border of consciousness, there were innumerable surface

impressions, like the tiny tracks that birds make in the snow. She could

still think, she could even remember; but her thoughts, her memories,

were no deeper than the light tracks of birds.

"Why did it happen? What was the meaning of it?" she asked dully,

sitting on the side of her bed, with her shoe in her hand. A few hours

ago she had loved Jason; now she loved him no longer. All that had drawn

her to him seemed now to drive her away; all that had been desire had

turned into loathing; all that was glowing with flame was now burned out

to cinders. There were women, she knew, who could love even when they

hated; but she was not one of these. The vein of iron in her nature

would never bend, would never break, would never melt completely in any

furnace. "He is weak and a coward," she thought. "How could I love a

coward?" Yes, how could she love a coward? And, strangely enough, when

she despised him most bitterly, she thought not of the wrong he had done

her, not of his treachery and his betrayal of her love, but of the way

he had looked in the moonlight, with his chalk-white face, his jerking

muscles, and his arm waving with the gestures of an evangelist.

Well, it was all over now. Everything was over but the immediate trouble

that she must face. Memories, impressions, undeveloped sensations that

led to nothing, swarmed upon her from the hidden crevices of her being.

The Old Stage Road. The way it branched at the burned cabin. The blasted

oak with the Gospel sign on it. The clink of the mare's shoes. The

benign faces of Dan and Beersheba as they looked back at her under

bunches of indigo. Work. Never anything but work. Her mother's voice

nagging, always nagging. Coral strands and palm trees and naked black

babies. What was the meaning of it? Jason as he looked last night. Weak,

whining, apologetic, blaming everything and everybody except himself.

His hair plastered in damp streaks on his forehead. His eyes, red and

blinking, as if he had wept. His hands that were never still; nervous

hands, without a firm grip on anything. How she hated him. What had she

ever seen in him to love? Cinders. Nothing left of it but cinders. Not

so much as a spark. Life. That was what it meant. Then, suddenly, the

way he used to look. His eyes when he smiled, crinkling at the corners.

His straight eyebrows brooding like a storm over his brown-black eyes.

The feeling of his hand on her arm. His charm. Yes, his charm that she

had forgotten. Like a breath of air, or a subtle fragrance, she felt his

charm stealing back through her senses, as if minute waves of aromatic

incense were blowing over her nerves. Though she hated him, could so

slight a thing as the memory of his smile awake the familiar vibrations?

Though her mind had broken away from him, was her body still held a

prisoner? And would his power come back always, without warning of its

approach, like the aching of a tooth that one has touched in a sensitive

spot? A few minutes ago she was deadened into the emotional stupor she

called peace. Now, because of a single external image, because of so

trivial a recollection as the way his eyebrows drew down over his eyes,

all the agony of life was beginning again.

She thrust her foot into the shoe and stood up, flinging back her head

as she went to the mirror to shake out her hair. The stubborn

resolution, which was the controlling motive in her character, shot

through her like a bolt. "Well, there's no use thinking," she said

aloud. "I've got to go through with it." While she combed her hair back

from her forehead, and twisted it into its usual compact knot on her

head, she gazed wonderingly at her face in the mirror. After all she had

suffered it seemed strange to her that her face had not withered and her

hair turned white in a night. But there was scarcely a perceptible

change in her appearance. The line of her hair was still dark and

waving; her eyes were still clear and blue; the velvety colour still

flowed beneath the few golden freckles on her cheeks. Only there was

something in her eyes that had not been there until yesterday. She knew

life now, she reflected, and that showed in her eyes.

Fastening her dress as she left the room, she hurried downstairs and

into the kitchen where her mother was already busy about breakfast.

"What do you want me to do, Ma?"

"Everything's 'most ready. You can call your father and the boys and

then pour out the coffee."

"Why didn't you wake me?"

"You're always tired Monday morning, so I thought I'd let you sleep. I

don't see how it is. Sermons rest me. Why didn't you bring your wet

things down to the kitchen last night?"

"I was so tired I forgot." Would her mother never stop nagging? Would

there never be any quiet?

She called the men to breakfast, poured out their coffee, and helped her

mother serve the cornbread and bacon. Then she sat down and ate slowly

and deliberately, forcing herself to swallow, as she had forced herself

to take gruel when she had had measles. The agony had died down; she

felt bruised and sore as if she had been beaten; but the intensity of

the pain had settled into a hard substance like lead in her breast.

There was not a ripple of emotion surrounding this island of bitterness

into which her love had resolved; there was only a vast sea of

indifference. The torture would return, she supposed. She was accustomed

now to the fact that it came and went, without reason, like one of her

mother's attacks of neuralgia; but, for the moment, at least, her nerves

had ceased their intolerable vibration.

After breakfast, when she walked along the road to the store, it seemed

to her that the landscape had lost colour, that the autumn glow had gone

out of the broomsedge. When she came to the fork she found herself

listening for the clink of the mare's shoes, and she resolved that she

would run into the woods or cower down in the brushwood if she heard the

buggy approaching. Never would she see him again, if she could prevent

it. Her mind played with absurd fancies. She imagined him dying, and she

saw herself looking on without pity, refusing to save him, standing

motionless while he drowned before her eyes, or was trampled to death by

steers. No, she would never see him again.

There was no sound at the fork. She walked on past the burned cabin,

past the Sneads' farm, where the cows looked at her pensively, past the

second belt of woods, and up the bone-white slope to the station. Here

she found the usual sprinkling of passengers for the early train, and in

order to avoid them she went into the store and began arranging the

shelves. In a minute Minnie May came to fetch her, and following the

little girl into the bedroom, Dorinda found Mrs. Pedlar lying flat in

bed, with the pink sacque, which she was too weak to slip on, spread

over her breast. The summer had drained the last reserve of her

strength. She was growing worse every hour, and she was so fragile that

her flesh was like paper. Yet she still kept her vivacity and her eager

interest in details.

"Oh, Dorinda," she breathed. "It isn't true, is it?"

Dorinda picked up the sacque and slipped it over the meagre shoulders.

"If you aren't careful, you'll take cold," she said quietly, and then,

after an imperceptible pause. "Yes, it is true."

"You don't mean he has married Geneva?"

"Yes, he has married Geneva."

"Oh, why? But, Dorinda----"

While Rose Emily was still talking, the girl turned away and went back

into the store. If she didn't work and deaden thought, she couldn't

possibly go through with it. All this numbness was on the surface of her

being, like the insensibility that is produced by a narcotic. It didn't

lessen a single pang underneath, nor alter a solitary fact of

existence. At any minute, without premonition, the effects of the

narcotic might wear off, and she might come back to life again. Coming

back to life, with all that she had to face, would be terrible. Taking

the broom from the corner behind the door, she began sweeping the floor

in hard, long strokes, as if she were sweeping away a mountain of trash;

and into these strokes she put as much as she could of her misery. When

she had finished sweeping the store, she brushed the mud from the

platform and the steps to the pile of refuse which had accumulated at

the back of the house. Then she brought a basin of water and a cake of

soap, and scrubbed the counter and the shelves where the dry goods were

kept. She worked relentlessly, with rigid determination, as if to clean

the store were the one absorbing purpose of her life.

"What's got into you, Dorinda?" asked Nathan, while he watched her. "You

look as if you'd gone dirt crazy." Dirt crazy! That was what the boys

said of her mother.

"I get so tired looking at dust," she replied.

"Dust? I didn't know there was a speck of dust anywhere around. Old

Jubilee swept and dusted this morning."

With her dripping brush in her hand, Dorinda turned from the shelves she

was washing and looked at him over the counter. She wondered why he had

not spoken of Jason, and some dormant instinct, buried in the morass of

her consciousness, was grateful to him because he had avoided the

subject. He must know. Everybody knew by this time. Yet he had not

alluded by word or look to the wreck of her happiness. Though she did

not think of it at the moment, long afterwards she realized that this

was one of the occasions when Nathan had shown a tactfulness which she

had never imagined that he possessed.

She finished the shelves, going scrupulously into each crack and corner.

Then, putting the basin and the cake of soap aside, she wiped the

dampness off with a cloth, and arranged the bolts of figured calico and

checked gingham in orderly rows. When this was over she attacked the

pasteboard boxes on the adjoining shelf, cleaning, dusting, reassorting

the contents of each separate box. It was amazing the way dust

collected. Old Jubilee had cleaned the store. Yet here was dirt poked

away in the corners.

She had made herself cheap, that was the trouble. If you are going to

cheapen yourself, her mother had said, be sure first that the man is not

cheap also. Then, even if you are sure, it pays to be prudent. Prudence

builds no poorhouses--that was her mother again. Oh, if only she had

known when knowledge could have been useful! If only you could live your

life after experience and not before! She knew now how to face

things. . . .

At that instant, with a stab of anguish, she became alive. Her pain,

which had been merely a dull ache, was suddenly as keen as if a blade

had been driven into her wound. She couldn't bear it. Nobody could bear

it. In a kind of daze she picked up the cloth, the dust pan, the cake of

soap, and carried them to the end of the room. Then, taking down her hat

from a peg behind the door, she put it on and went out of the store and

across the yard to the gate and the road. It seemed to her that if only

she could reach home quickly, she should find that it had all been a

mistake, that something had happened to make the situation less terrible

than it appeared from a distance. What this something was she tried to

imagine. Perhaps the old man had lied. Perhaps Jason was not really

married. Perhaps he hadn't meant her to understand that he was married.

There were so many possibilities, she told herself, that she could not

think of them all. A hundred accidents--anything might have occurred.

Only at the store she felt smothered and shut away, as if she were left

behind by the hours. A deep instinct, like the instinct that drives a

wounded animal to flight, was urging her to go somewhere--anywhere--as

long as it was to a different place. She had made a mistake, she saw

now, to come to the store. At home it would be easier. At home she

should be able to think of some way out of her misery.

She walked as fast as she could, panting for breath, hurrying over the

bad places in the road, as if the thing she feared were pursuing her.

Down the long slope; through the thin pines; over the mile of red clay

road, broken with mud holes; past the Sneads' pasture, where the sourish

smell of cattle hung perpetually in the air; by the burned cabin at the

fork; and on into the edge of Hoot Owl Woods at the beginning of Old

Farm. When, at last, she struggled over the sagging bridge and up the

rocky grade to the porch, she was almost surprised to find that the

house was not on fire. There was an unnatural aspect, she felt, in the

familiar scene, as of a place that had suffered beneath a tornado and

yet remained unchanged on the surface. And this smiling October serenity

appeared to her to be unendurable. Trembling like a blade of grass, she

stood hesitating on the threshold. "Why did I come?" she asked in

amazement. "What did I expect to find?"

"Is that you, Dorinda?" called her mother from the kitchen, where she

was washing clothes. A kettle of "sour pickle" was simmering on the

stove, and the air was laden with the pungent aroma. "What on earth is

the matter?"

"I forgot something."

"It must have been mighty important. What was it you forgot?"

The trembling had passed from Dorinda's limbs to her thoughts. She felt

as if she should drop. "I--I can't remember," she answered.

"Well, I never!" Mrs. Oakley appeared in the doorway, her bare arms

glazed with soapsuds and her face beaded with steam. "You ain't

sick, are you?"

"No, I remember now. It was a piece of embroidery Rose Emily was doing.

She asked me to bring it."

"Embroidery? I should think she might have managed to wait till

to-morrow."

"I didn't mind the walk. It is better than being in the store."

"Anyway, you'd better rest a bit before you go back. You look real

peaked. Have you got a headache?" So her mother hadn't heard! Who would

be the first one to tell her?

"A little. It was getting wet yesterday, I reckon." She must say

something. If she didn't, her mother would question her all day.

"If you'd listened to what I told you," said Mrs. Oakley, "you wouldn't

have got caught in that storm. Before you go upstairs you'd better rub a

little camphor on your forehead."

She lifted her arms, on which soapsuds had dried like seaweed, and went

back into the kitchen, while Dorinda, without stopping to look for the

camphor, toiled upstairs to her room. Here she flung herself on the bed

and lay staring straight up at the stained ceiling, where wasps were

crawling. One, two, three, she counted them idly. There was a pile of

apples on her mantelpiece. That must have brought them. But she couldn't

lie here. Springing up, she went over to the mirror and began nervously

changing things on her dressing-table.

Yes, she was ashen about the eyes and her features were thin and drawn.

Her warm colour still held firm, but she was mottled about the mouth

like a person in a high fever. Even her full red lips looked parched and

unnatural. "I am losing my looks," she thought. "I am only twenty and I

look middle-aged."

Why had she come back? It was worse here than it was at the store. Her

suffering was more intolerable, and she seemed farther away from relief

than she had been while she was cleaning the shelves. Perhaps if she

went back she should find that it was easier. Something might have

happened to change things. At least her mother wouldn't be at the store,

and she dreaded her mother more than anything that she had to face. Yes,

she had made a mistake to come home.

Going over to the curtain, she pushed it aside and looked at her

dresses, taking them down from the hooks and hanging them back again, as

if she could not remember which one she wanted. Then, in a single flash,

just as it had returned at the store, all the horror rushed over her

afresh, and she turned away and ran out of the room. Any spot, she

realized, was more endurable than the place she was in.

"You ain't going back already, Dorinda?" called her mother from the

kitchen.

"Yes, I'm going back. I feel better."

"It seems to me it wasn't worth your while walking all that way twice.

I'd take my time going back. There ain't a bit of use hurrying like

that. When you come home in the evening, I wish you'd remember to bring

me that box of allspice. You forgot it on Saturday. It seems to me

you're growing mighty forgetful."

But Dorinda was far down the walk on her way to the gate, and she did

not stop to reply. She retraced her steps rapidly over the bridge and

along the edge of the woods, where the shadows lay thick and cool.

Behind her she heard the bumping of a wagon in the mud holes; but she

did not glance round, for she knew that it was only one of the farmers

on the way to the station.

"Going to the store?" inquired the man, as he came up with her. "Can I

give you a lift?"

She shook her head, smiling up at him. "I'm not going back yet awhile,

thank you. I'm out looking for one of our turkeys."

Stepping out of the road, she waited until the wagon had bumped out of

sight, and then went on, in a bewildered way, as if she could not see

where she was walking. As she approached the fork, her legs refused to

carry her farther, and scrambling on her knees up the bank by the

roadside, she dropped to the ground and abandoned herself to despair.

She couldn't go on and she couldn't sit still. All she could do was to

cower there behind the thicket of brushwood, and let life have its way

with her. She had reached the end of endurance. That was what it meant,

she had reached the end of what she could bear. The trembling, which had

begun in her hands and feet, ran now in threads all over her body. For a

minute her mind was a blank; then fear leaped at her out of the

stillness. Springing to her feet, she looked wildly about, and sank down

again because her legs would not support her.

"I've got to do something," she thought. "I've got to do something, or

I'll go out of my mind." Never once, in her fright and pain, did the

idea of an appeal to Jason enter her thoughts. No, she had finished with

him for ever. There was no help there, and if there were help in him,

she would die before she would seek it.

Raising her head, she leaned against the bole of a tree and looked, with

dimmed eyes, at the October morning. Around her she heard the murmurous

rustle of leaves, the liquid notes of a wood robin, like the sprinkling

of rain on the air, the distant shrill chanting of insects; all the

natural country sounds which she would have called silence. Smooth as

silk the shadows lay on the red clay road. Over the sky there was a thin

haze, as if one looked at the sun through smoked glasses. "You've got to

do something," repeated a derisive voice in her brain. "You've got to do

something, or you'll go out of your mind." It seemed to her that the

whole landscape waited, inarticulate but alive, for her decision.

Despair overwhelmed her; yet through all her misery there persisted a

dim, half conscious recognition that she was living with only a part of

her being. Deep down in her, beneath the rough texture of experience,

her essential self was still superior to her folly and ignorance, was

superior even to the conspiracy of circumstances that hemmed her in. And

she felt that in a little while this essential self would reassert its

power and triumph over disaster. Vague, transitory, comforting, this

premonition brooded above the wilderness of her thoughts. Yes, she was

not broken. She could never be broken while the vein of iron held in her

soul.

For a long while she sat there by the roadside, with her eyes on the

pale sunshine and the transparent shadows. What would her mother say if

she knew? When would she know? Who would have the courage to tell her?

For twenty years they had lived in the house together, yet they were

still strangers. For twenty years they had not spent a night apart, and

all the time her mother had dreamed of coral strands and palm trees,

while she herself had grown into a thing as strange and far away as

Africa. Were people like this everywhere, all over the world, each one a

universe in one's self separate like the stars in a vast emptiness?

XVI

Far over the autumn fields, she heard the whistle of the train as it

rounded the long curve at the station. Before the sound had floated past

her she had come to one of those impetuous decisions which were

characteristic of her temperament. "I'll go away in the morning," she

resolved. "I'll go on the first train, the one that whistles at sunrise.

If I take that, I can leave the house before light."

Immediately afterwards, as soon as the idea had taken possession of her,

she felt the renewal of courage in her thoughts. Once that was settled,

she told herself, and there was no turning back, everything would be

easier. Just to go away somewhere. It made no difference where the train

went. She would go to the very end, the farther the better, as long as

her money held out. "I can scrape together almost seventy dollars," she

thought. "Besides the fifty I made at the store, I've saved the twenty

dollars Nathan and Rose Emily gave me for a wedding present. That much

ought to take me somewhere and keep me until I can find something to

do." Her father, she realized with a pang, would have to manage without

her. Perhaps he would be obliged to mortgage the place again. She hoped

he wouldn't have to sell Dan and Beersheba, and she was confident in her

heart that he would never do this. He would sooner part with the roof

over his head. It would be hard on him; but he had Josiah and Rufus, and

after her marriage, it was doubtful if she could have continued to help

him. "Josiah may marry too," she reflected, "and of course Rufus is

always uncertain." Nobody could tell what Rufus might some day take it

into his head to do. Then, because weakness lay in that direction, she

turned her resolute gaze toward her own future. There was no help

outside herself. She knew that the situation, bad as it was now, would

be far worse before it was better. Romantic though she was, she was

endowed mentally with a stubborn aptitude for facing facts, for looking

at life fearlessly; and now that imagination had done its worst, she set

herself to the task of rebuilding her ruined world. All her trouble, she

felt, had come to her from trying to make life over into something it

was not. Dreams, that was the danger. Like her mother she had tried to

find a door in the wall, an escape from the tyranny of things as they

are; and like her mother, she had floundered among visions. Even though

she was miserable now, her misery was solid ground; her feet were firmly

planted among the ancient rocks of experience. She had finished with

romance, as she had finished with Jason, for ever.

Twisting about on the earth, she pushed aside the branches, and looked

down on Old Farm, folded there so peacefully between the road and the

orchard. Wreathed in sunlight as pale as cowslips, she saw the house

under the yellowing locust trees. Over the roof a few swallows were

curving; from a single chimney smoke rose in a column; there was a

cascade of shadows down the rocky path to the gate. She saw these

blended details, not as she had seen them yesterday or the moment before

she had made her decision, but as one looks on a place which one has

loved and from which one is parting for ever. A bloom of sentiment and

regret coloured the stark outline; and so, she knew, it would remain

indelibly softened in her memory.

Rising from the ground, she went back over the road to the bridge and up

the rocky grade to the porch. As she drew nearer she saw her mother come

out of the kitchen and go in the direction of the hog-pen, with a basin

of vegetable parings in her hand. For a few minutes at least the house

would be empty! Running indoors and up the two flights of stairs to the

attic, Dorinda brought down an old carpet bag which had belonged first

to her grandfather and then to her mother. Once, when she was a child,

her mother had used it when she had taken her to spend a night in

Richmond, with a distant relative, an old maid, who had died the next

year, and again Josiah and Rufus had carried the bag with them when they

went to the State fair one autumn. Now, while she dusted it inside and

out, and tossed the few papers it contained into a bureau drawer, she

decided that it would hold all the clothes she could take with her. "It

will be heavy, but I'll manage it," she thought, moving softly lest her

mother should return without stopping to gather the eggs in the

henhouse. "I'd just as well pack and get it over," she added. "Anything

is better than sitting down and waiting for something to happen."

One by one, she smoothed and folded her wedding clothes. Six of

everything; nightgowns, chemises, corset covers, with frills across the

bosom, starched white petticoats, with wide tucked flounces. She looked

at each garment with swimming eyes and a lump like a rock in her throat,

before she laid it away in one of the bulging compartments of the

carpet bag. How fine the stitches were! It was a wonder what her mother

could do with her rheumatic joints.

Stepping as lightly as she could, she brought her shoes from the closet

and packed them away. Then the dresses, one after another. Two blue

cotton dresses that she wore in the store. The pink gingham Rose Emily

had given her. Would she ever need that again, she wondered. Last of

all, the blue nun's veiling. "It would have been more sensible to have

got it darker," she thought grimly. There wasn't room for the hat; but,

after she had put in her stockings and handkerchiefs and collars, with

the bits of ribbon she sometimes wore at her neck, she folded the orange

shawl and spread it on top of everything else. "That may come in

useful," she added. "You never can tell what the weather will be." It

was October, and everybody said winter came earlier in the North. She

had decided prudently that she would wear her old blue merino, with the

tan ulster and the felt hat she had put away from moths in the spare

room. She could easily steal in and get them out of the closet while her

mother was looking after the pigs or the chickens.

Well, that was over. After she had closed and strapped the bag, she

pushed it behind the curtain. There was no telling, she reminded

herself, when her mother would poke her nose into places.

When she went downstairs it was twelve o'clock and the men had come in

from the fields.

"Why, Dorinda, I didn't know you'd be here to dinner!" her mother

exclaimed. "Is your head bad again?"

"Yes, I wasn't feeling so well, and there wasn't much to do at the

store."

"I thought Monday was the busiest day." How like her mother that was!

She could never let a thing drop. Some demon of contradiction impelled

her to find a point of offense everywhere. There was a glass pitcher of

buttermilk on the table. A little boy, the son of William Snead, had

brought it over early in the morning, as soon as Miss Tabitha had

churned. Lifting the pitcher, Dorinda filled the five glasses standing

in a circle at the end of the table. As she handed a glass to her

father, she looked at him with a grave impersonal sentiment, as if he

were a part of the farm that she was leaving. Nothing, not even her

mother's nervous nagging, could annoy her to-day. She felt only a

despairing tenderness, like a mist of tears, in her heart.

"I'm sorry you ain't well, daughter," Joshua said, as he took the glass

from her hand; and she felt that he had put an incalculable affection

into the words. It was the only remark he made during the meal, and

ordinary as it was, it seemed to bring her closer to him than she had

ever been in her life. Or was it only because she was parting from him

so soon? Everything was precious to her now, precious and indescribably

sad and lovely. If she were to speak a word, she knew that she should

burst into tears.

In the afternoon, when she had helped her mother hang out the clothes at

the back of the house, she came indoors and waited for an opportunity to

bring down the carpet bag. "Perhaps I've always tried too hard," she

thought wearily. "If I'd just give up and let things drift, it might be

that something would go right." She dropped on the bottom step of the

staircase; but she had no sooner decided to give up the struggle than

she heard her mother's voice telling her that she was going down into

the garden.

"The last of those tomatoes will spoil if I don't pick them," she said.

"Do you want me to help you?" Dorinda called back.

"No, the sun is kind of sickening. You'd better keep out of it. There

ain't much left after the storm, but I might as well use the tomatoes."

She went out, with the big splint-basket on her arm; and she was

scarcely out of sight before Dorinda had dragged down the carpet bag and

hidden it under the front porch behind one of the primitive rock pillars

of the foundation. It would be impossible, she knew, to bring down the

bag in the morning without waking her mother, who was a light sleeper.

Her father and the boys, drugged by toil in the open, could sleep

through thunder; but her mother would start up and call out at the

scratching of a mouse. After she had hidden the bag, she went back into

the spare room and unwrapped her tan ulster and brown felt hat from the

newspapers which protected them from moths. As she unpinned the parcels,

a smell of mingled camphor and lavender was released on the air, and she

hoped that her mother would not detect it. "If she says anything, I'll

tell her it's time to be wearing my winter clothes," she decided, while

she carried the ulster and hat upstairs to her room. Since she had clung

desperately to the thought of going away, her suffering had been more

endurable; the vehement pain had dulled into an apathetic despair which

deadened every cell of her body. She dreaded the moment when the stupor

would lift and she should think and feel clearly again.

All night she slept only in restless waves of unconsciousness. The

darkness was broken up into false dawns, and at every deceptive glimmer

she would steal softly to the window and watch for the first splinter of

light. While it was still dark, she dressed herself in the clothes she

had laid by her bed, and then sat waiting for the sound of a crow in the

henhouse. In the early part of the night there was a vaporous moon; but

as the hours wore on, the sky clouded over, and when the day began to

break a fine, slow rain was falling. "I hate so terribly to go," she

thought, while she smoothed her hair and then wrapped up her brush and

comb and slipped them into the pocket of her ulster. "I don't believe

I'll go after all." But she knew, even while she lingered over the idea,

that there was no turning back.

When she remembered it afterwards it seemed to her that the longest

journey of her life was the one down the dark staircase. In reality her

descent occupied only a few minutes; but the tumult of her emotions, the

startled vigilance of her nerves, crowded these vivid instants with

excitement. She lived years, not moments, while she hung there in the

darkness, expecting the sound of her mother's voice or the vision of a

grey head thrust out of the chamber doorway. What would her mother say

if she discovered her? What would she say when she went upstairs and

found her room empty? At the foot of the staircase Rambler poked his

nose into her hand, and padded after her to the front door. He would

have followed her outside, but stooping over him, she kissed his long

anxious face before she pushed him back into the hall. Her eyes were

heavy with tears as she hurried noiselessly across the porch, down the

steps, and round the angle of the house to the rock pillar where she had

hidden her bag. Not until she had passed through the gate and into the

shadow of the woods, did she rest the heavy bag on the ground and stop

to draw breath. Now, at last, she was safe from discovery. "If nobody

comes by, I'll have to take some of the things out of the bag and try to

carry it," she said aloud, in a desperate effort to cling to practical

details. But it was scarcely likely, she told herself presently, that

nobody would come by. Even on a rainy morning there were always a few

farmers who went out to the station at daybreak.

While she waited there by the bridge, she seemed to be alone on the

earth. It was a solitude not of the body but of the spirit, vast,

impersonal, and yet burdened, in some strange way, with an

incommunicable regret. The night had released the wild scents of autumn,

and these were mingled with the formless terrors that overshadowed her

mind. She thought without words, enveloped in a despondency as shapeless

as night.

Up the road there was the measured beat of a trot, followed by the light

rattle of a vehicle beyond the big honey-locust at the pasture bars.

While she watched, the rattle grew louder, accompanied by the jarring

turn of a screw, and a minute later a queer two-wheeled gig, with a hood

like a chicken coop, appeared on the slope by the gate. She knew the

vehicle well; it belonged to Mr. Kettledrum, the veterinarian, and she

had passed it frequently on the road to the station.

"He will talk me to death," she thought, with dogged patience, "but I

can't help it."

Lifting the carpet bag, which felt heavier than it had done at the

start, she stepped out into the road and waited until the nodding gig

drew up beside her. Mr. Kettledrum, a gaunt, grizzled man of middle age,

with a beaked nose and a drooping moustache, which was dyed henna-colour

from tobacco, looked down at her with his sharp twinkling eyes.

"Thanky, Dorinda, I'm as well as common," he replied to her greeting. "I

declar', it looks for all the world as if you was settin' out on a

journey."

"So I am." Dorinda smiled bravely. "I wonder if you'll give me a lift to

the station?"

"To be sure, to be sure." In a minute he was out on the ground and had

swung the bag into the gig beside a peculiar kind of medicine case made

of sheepskin. "I'm on my way back from Sam Garlick's, and it'll be more

than a pleasure," he added gallantly, "to have you ride part of the way

with me. Sam sets a heap of store by that two-year-old bay of his, and

he had me over in the night to ease him with colic. Wall, wall, it ain't

an easy life to be either a horse or a horse doctor in this here

on certain world."

It was easier to laugh than to speak, and his little joke, which was as

ancient and as trustworthy as his two-wheeled gig, started them well on

their way. After all, he was a kind man; her father had had him once or

twice to see Dan or Beersheba; and people said that, at a pinch, he had

been known to treat human beings as successfully as horses. He had a

large family of tow-headed children; and though she had heard recently

that his wife was "pining away," nobody blamed him, for he had been a

good provider, and wives were known occasionally to pine from other

causes than husbands.

"It's a right good thing I came by when I did," he remarked genially.

"As it happened, I was goin' to stop by anyway for that early train. I

like to allow plenty of time, and I generally unhitch my mare befo' the

train blows. She ain't skittish. Naw, I ain't had no trouble with her;

but she's got what some folks might consider eccentric habits, an' I

ain't takin' no chances. So you say you're goin' off on a journey?" he

inquired, dropping his voice, and she knew by intuition that he was

wondering if he had better allude to Jason's marriage. He would blame

him of course; a man couldn't jilt a woman with impunity at Pedlar's

Mill; but what good would that, or anything else, do her now?

"Yes, I'm going away." She tried to make her voice steady.

"On the up train or the down one?" he inquired, as he leaned out of the

gig to squirt a jet of tobacco juice in the road. Upon reflection, he

had abandoned his sympathetic manner and assumed one of facetious

pleasantry.

"The earliest. The one that goes north. Shall we be in time for it?"

He pursed his lips beneath the sweeping moustache. "Don't you worry.

We'll git you thar. Whar are you bound for?"

She spoke quickly. "I'm going to New York." That was the farthest place

that came to her mind.

"You don't say so?" He appeared astonished. "Then you'll be on the train

all day. You didn't neglect to bring along a snack, did you?"

A snack? No, she had not thought of one, and she had eaten no breakfast.

Mr. Kettledrum was regretful but reassuring. "It's always better to

provide something when you set out," he remarked. "An empty stomach

ain't a good travellin' companion; but it's likely enough that the

conductor can git you a bite at one of the stops. Along up the road, at

the junction, thar's generally some niggers with fried chicken legs; but

all the same it's safer to take along a snack when you're goin' to

travel far."

They were passing the fork of the road. Over the big gate she could see

the ample sweep of the meadows, greenish-grey under the drizzle of rain;

and beyond Gooseneck Creek, the roof and chimneys of Five Oaks made a

red wound in the sky. Seen through the cleft of the trees, the whole

place wore a furtive and hostile air. How miserable the fields looked on

a wet day, miserable and yet as if they were trying to keep up an

appearance. Some natural melancholy in the scene drifted through her

mind and out again into the landscape. She felt anew her kinship with

the desolation and with the rain that fell, fine and soft as mist, over

it all. Even when she went away she would carry a part of it with her.

"That's what life is for most people, I reckon," she thought drearily.

"Just barren ground where they have to struggle to make anything grow."

"Now, I've never been as far as New York," Mr. Kettledrum was saying in

a sprightly manner. "But from all accounts it must be a fine city. My

brother John's son Harry has lived there for fifteen years. He's got a

job with some wholesale grocers--Bartlett and Tribble. If you run across

him while you're there, be sure to tell him who you are. He'll be glad

of a word from his old uncle. Don't forget the name. Bartlett and

Tribble. They've stores all over the town, Harry says. You can't

possibly miss them."

They had reached the Sneads' pasture, deserted at this early hour except

for a mare and her colt. A minute later they passed the square brick

house, where the cows were trailing slowly across the lawn in the

direction of the bars which a small coloured boy was lowering. Then came

the mile of bad road, broken by mud holes. On they spun into the thin

woods and out again to the long slope. At the farm her mother was

calling her. There was the smell of frying bacon in the kitchen. Her

father was coming in from the stable. Rufus was slouching into his chair

with a yawn. Steam was pouring from the spout of the big tin coffee-pot

on the table. The glint of light on the stove and the walls. Rambler.

Flossie. . . . She remembered that she had eaten nothing. Hunger seized

her, and worse than hunger, the longing to burst into tears.

"Wall, here we are. The train's blowing now down at the next station.

You've plenty of time to take it easy while I unhitch the mare." He

helped her to alight, and then, picking up her bag, carried it down to

the track. "You jest stand here whar the train stops," he said. "I'll

take the mare out and be back in a jiffy. You've got your ticket ready,

I reckon?"

She shook her head. No, she hadn't her ticket; but it didn't matter; she

would get one on the train. It occurred to her, while he stepped off

nimbly on his long legs, which reminded her of stilts, that if she had

not met him in the road, she would have missed the early train north and

have taken the later one that went to Richmond. So small an incident,

and yet the direction in which she was going, and perhaps her whole

future, was changed by it. Well, she knew what was ahead of her, she

thought miserably, while she stood there shivering in the wet. She was

chilled; she was empty; she was heartbroken; yet, in spite of her

wretchedness, hope could not be absent from her courageous heart. The

excitement of her journey was already stirring in her veins, and waiting

there beside the track, in the rain, she began presently to look, not

without confidence, to the future. After all, things might have been

worse. She was young; she was strong; she had seventy dollars pinned

securely inside the bosom of her dress. Dimly she felt that she was

meeting life, at this moment, on its own terms, stripped of illusion,

stripped even of idealism, except the idealism she could wring from the

solid facts of experience. The blow that had shattered her dreams had

let in the cloudless flood of reality. "You can't change the past by

thinking," she told herself stubbornly, "but there must be something

ahead. There must be something in life besides love."

The train whistled by the mill; the smoke billowed upward and outward;

and the engine rushed toward her. Her knees were trembling so that she

could barely stand; but her eyes were bright with determination, and

there was a smile on her lips. Then, just as the wheels slackened and

stopped, she saw Nathan running down the gradual descent from the store.

Reaching her as she was about to step on the train, he thrust a shoe box

into her hand.

"You couldn't go so far without a bite of food. I fixed you a little

snack." There was a queer look in his eyes. Absurd as it seemed, for a

minute he reminded her of her father.

"So Mr. Kettledrum told you I was going away?"

He nodded. "Take care of yourself. If you want any money, write back for

it. You know we're here, don't you?"

She smiled up at him with drenched eyes. A moment more and she would

have broken down; but before she had time to reply she was pushed into

the train; and when she looked out of the window, Nathan was waving

cheerfully from the track. "I wonder how I could ever have thought him

so ugly?" she asked herself through her tears.

The figures at the station wavered, receded, and melted at last into the

transparent screen of the distance. Then the track vanished also, the

deserted mill, the store, the old freight car, and the dim blue edge of

the horizon. All that she could see, when she raised the window and

looked out, was the dull glow of the broomsedge, smothered yet alive

under the sad autumn rain.

_PART

SECOND_

PINE

"_The big pine was like greenish bronze_. . . ."

I

The big pine was like greenish bronze against the October sky. . . .

A statue in Central Park had brought it back to her, the pine and the

ruined graveyard and the autumn sunlight raking the meadows. It was a

fortnight since she had come to New York, and in that fortnight she felt

that she had turned into stone. Her shoes were worn thin; her feet

throbbed and ached from walking on hard pavements. There were times,

especially toward evening, when the soles of her feet were edged with

fire, and the pain brought stinging tears to her eyes. Yet she walked

on grimly because it was easier to walk than to wait. Up Fifth Avenue;

down one of the cross streets to the Park, which was, she thought,

merely an imitation of the country; back again to Sixth Avenue; and up

Sixth Avenue until she drifted again over the Park and into the

prison-like streets that ran toward the river. Occasionally she glanced

up to read the name of a street; but the signs told her nothing. Fifth

Avenue she had learned by name, and Broadway, and the dirty street where

she rented a hall room, for fifty cents a day, over a cheap restaurant.

Yesterday, she had asked for work on the other side of the city; but

nobody wanted help in a store, and her obstinate pride insisted that she

would rather starve than take a place as a servant. Twice she had waited

in the restaurant beneath her room; but the dirt and the close smells

had nauseated her, and by the end of the second day she had been too

sick to stand on her feet. After that the waitress whose place she had

taken had returned, and the woman in charge had not wanted her any

longer. "You'd better get used to smells before you try to make a living

in the city," she had said disagreeably. The advice was sound, as

Dorinda knew, and she had no just cause for resentment. Yet there were

moments when it seemed to her that New York would live in her

recollection not as a place but as an odour.

All day she walked from one stony street to another, stopping to rest

now and then on a bench in one of the squares, where she would sit

motionless for hours, watching the sparrows. Her food, usually a tough

roll and a sausage of dubious tenderness, she bought at the cheapest

place she could find and carried, wrapped in newspaper, to the bench

where she rested. Her only hope, she felt, lay in the dogged instinct

which told her that when things got as bad as they could, they were

obliged, if they changed at all, to change for the better. There was no

self-pity in her thoughts. The unflinching Presbyterian in her blood

steeled her against sentimentality. She would meet life standing and she

would meet it with her eyes open; but she knew that the old buoyant

courage, the flowing outward of the spirit, was over for ever.

What surprised her, when she was not too tired to think of it, was that

the ever-present sense of sin, which made the female mind in

mid-Victorian literature resemble a page of the more depressing

theology, was entirely absent from her reflections. She was sorry about

the blue dress; she felt remorse because of the cow her mother might

have had; but everything else that had happened was embraced in the

elastic doctrine of predestination. It had to be, she felt, and no

matter how hard she had struggled she could not have prevented it.

At night, worn out with fatigue, she would go back to the room over the

restaurant. The brakeman on the train had given her the address, and he

had put her in the street car that brought her to the door in Sixth

Avenue. Here also the smells of beer and of the cooking below stairs had

attacked her like nausea. The paper on the walls was torn and stained;

all the trash in the room had been swept under the bed; and when she

started to wash her hands at the rickety washstand in one corner, she

had found a dead cockroach in the pitcher. Turning to the narrow window,

she had dropped into a chair and stared down on the crawling throng in

the street. Disgust, which was more irksome than pain, had rushed over

her. After all the fuss that had been made over it, she had asked in

bitter derision, was this Life?

Walking up Sixth Avenue one afternoon, she asked this question again.

Something was trying to break her. Life or the will of God, it made no

difference, for one hurt as much as the other. She could not see any use

in the process, but she went on as blindly as a machine that has been

wound up and cannot stop until it has run down. Nothing was alive except

the burning sore of her memory. All the blood of her body had been drawn

into it. Every other emotion--affection, tenderness, sympathy,

sentiment--all these natural approaches to experience had shrivelled up

like nerves that are dead. She was consumed by a solitary anguish; and

beyond this anguish there was nothing but ashes. The taste of ashes was

in her mouth whenever she tried to look ahead or to pretend an interest

in what the future might bring. Though her mind saw Jason as he was,

weak, false, a coward and a hypocrite, he was so firmly knit into her

being that, even when she tore him from her thoughts, she still suffered

from the aching memory of him in her senses. Pedlar's Mill or New York,

what did it matter? The city might have been built of straw, so little

difference did it make to her inescapable pain.

At first the noises and the strange faces had confused her. Then it

occurred to her that there might be temporary solace in the crowd, that

she might lose herself in the street and drift on wherever the throng

carried her. Her self-confidence returned when she found how easy it was

to pursue her individual life, to retain her secret identity, in the

midst of the city. She discovered presently that when nothing matters

the problem of existence becomes amazingly simple. Fear, which had been

perversely associated with happiness, faded from her mind when despair

entered it. From several unpleasant episodes she had learned to be on

the watch and to repulse advances that were disagreeable; but at such

moments her courage proved to be as vast as her wretchedness. Once an

elderly woman in deep mourning approached her while she sat on a bench

in the Park, and inquired solicitously if she needed employment. In the

beginning the stranger had appeared helpful; but a little conversation

revealed that, in spite of her mourning garb, she was in search of a

daughter of joy. After this several men had followed Dorinda on

different occasions. "Do I look like that kind?" she had asked herself

bitterly. But in each separate instance, when she glanced round at her

pursuer, he had vanished. In a city where joy may be had for a price,

there are few who turn and follow the footsteps of tragedy. Yes, she

could take care of herself. Poverty might prove to be a match for her

strength, but as far as men were concerned, she decided that she had

taken their measure and was no longer afraid of them.

A surface car clanged threateningly in her ears, and stepping back on

the corner, she looked uncertainly over the block in front of her. While

she hesitated there, a man who had passed turned and stared at her,

arrested by the fresh colour in the face under the old felt hat. Her

cheeks were thinner; there were violet half-moons under her eyes; but

her eyes appeared by contrast larger and more radiantly blue. The

suffering of the last two weeks, fatigue, hunger, and unhappiness had

refined her features and imparted a luminous delicacy to her skin.

Threading the traffic to the opposite pavement, she turned aimlessly,

without purpose and without conjecture, into one of the gloomy streets.

It was quieter here, and after the clamour and dirt of Sixth Avenue, the

quiet was soothing. Longer shadows stretched over the grey pavement, and

the rows of dingy houses, broken now and then by the battered front of

an inconspicuous shop, reminded her fantastically of acres of

broomsedge. When she had walked several blocks she found that the

character of the street changed slightly, and it occurred to her, as she

glanced indifferently round, that by an accident she had drifted into

the only old-fashioned neighbourhood in New York. Or were there others

and had she been unable to find them? She had stopped, without observing

it, in front of what had once been a flower garden, and had become, in

its forlorn and neglected condition, a refuge for friendless statues and

outcast objects of stone. For a few minutes the strangeness of the scene

attracted her. Then, as the pain in her feet mounted upward to her

knees, she moved on again and paused to look at a collection of battered

mahogany furniture, which had overflowed from a shop to the pavement. "I

wonder what they'll do with that old stuff," she thought idly. "Some of

it is good, too. There's a wardrobe exactly like the one

great-grandfather left."

She was looking at the mahogany wardrobe, when the door of the shop

widened into a crack, and a grey and white cat, with a pleasant face,

squeezed herself through and came out to watch the sparrows in the

street.

"She is the image of Flossie," thought Dorinda. Her eyes smarted with

tears, and stooping over, she stroked the cat's arching back, while she

remembered that her mother would be busy at this hour getting supper.

"Anybody can see you like cats," said a voice behind her; and turning

her head, she saw that a stout middle-aged woman, wearing a black

knitted shawl over a white shirtwaist, was standing in the midst of the

old furniture. Like her cat she had a friendly face and wide-awake eyes

beneath sleek grey and white hair.

"She is just like one we had at home," Dorinda answered, with her

ingenuous smile.

"You don't live in New York, then?" remarked the woman, while she

glanced charitably at the girl's faded tan ulster.

"No, I came from the country two weeks ago. I want to find something to

do."

The woman folded her shawl tightly over her bosom and shook her head.

"Well, it's hard to get work these days. There are so many walking the

streets in search of it. The city is a bad place to be when you are out

of work."

Dorinda's heart trembled and sank. "I thought there was always plenty to

do in the city."

"You did? Well, whoever told you that never tried it, I guess."

"There are so many stores. I hoped I could find something to do in one

of them."

"Have you ever worked in a store?"

"Yes, at home. It was a country store where they kept everything."

"I know that kind. My father used to keep one up the state."

As she bent over the cat, Dorinda asked in a voice that she tried to

keep steady. "You don't need any help, do you?"

The other shook her head sorrowfully. "I wish we did; but times are so

hard that we've had to give up the assistant we had. I'm just out of the

hospital, too, and that took up most of our savings for the last year."

Her large, kind face showed genuine sympathy. "I'd help you if I could,"

she continued, "because you've got a look that reminds me of my sister

who went into a convent. She's dead now, but she had those straight

black eyebrows, jutting out just like yours over bright blue eyes. That

sort of colouring ain't so common as it used to be. Anyhow, it made me

think of her as soon as I looked at you. It gave me a start at first.

That's because I'm still weak after the operation, I guess."

"Was it a bad operation?"

"Gall stones. One of the worst, they say, when it has gone on as long as

my trouble. Have you ever been in a hospital?"

Dorinda shook her head. "There wasn't any such thing where I lived. We

always nursed the sick at home. Great-grandfather was bedridden for

years before his death, and my mother nursed him and did all the work

too."

The woman looked at her with interest. "Well, that's the way you do in

the country, of course," she replied, adding after a moment's

hesitation, "You look pretty tired out. Would you like to come in and

rest a few minutes? I was getting so low in my spirits a little while

ago that I looked out to see if I couldn't find somebody to speak a few

words to. When this sinking feeling comes on me in the afternoon, I

don't like to be by myself. I thought a cup of tea might help me. They

haven't let me touch beer since I went to the hospital, so I'd just put

the kettle on to boil. It ought to be ready about now, and a bite of

something might pick you up as well as me. My mother came from England

and she was always a great one for a cup of tea. 'Put the kettle on,'

she used to say, 'I'm feeling low in my spirits.' Day or night it didn't

make any difference. Whenever she felt herself getting low she used to

have her tea."

She led the way, the cat following, through the shop to a corner at the

back, where she could still watch the door and the pavement. Here a

kettle was humming on a small gas stove; and a quaint little table, with

a red damask cloth over it, was laid for tea. There were cups and

saucers, a tea set, and a wooden caddy with a castle painted on the

side. "It looks old-fashioned, I know, but we are old-fashioned folks,

and my husband sometimes says that we haven't got any business in the

progressive 'nineties. Everything's too advanced for us now, even

religion. I guess it's living so much with old furniture and things that

were made in the last century."

Dorinda smiled at her gratefully and sat down beside the little red

cloth, with her smarting feet crossed under the table. If only she might

take off her shoes, she thought, she could begin to be comfortable. At

Pedlar's Mill tea was not used except in illness or bereavement, and she

was not prepared for the immediate consolation it afforded her. Strange

that a single cup of tea and a buttered muffin from a bakery should

revive her courage! After all, the city wasn't so stony and inhospitable

as she had believed. People were friendly here, if you found the right

ones, just as they were in the country. They liked cats too. She

remembered that she had seen a number of cats in New York, and they all

looked contented and prosperous. It was pleasant in the little room,

with its restful air of another period; but at last tea was over, and

she thanked the woman and rose to leave. "I can't tell you the good it's

done me," she said, and added plaintively, "Do you know of any place

where I might find work?"

The woman--her name, she said, was Garvey--bent her head in meditation

over the tea-pot. "I do know a woman who wants a plain seamstress for a

few weeks," she said at last a trifle dubiously, for, in spite of her

kindness, she was a cautious body. "The girl she had went to the

hospital the day I came out, and she has never been suited since then.

Do you know how to sew?"

"I've helped make children's dresses, and of course my own clothes,"

Dorinda added apologetically. "You see, I never had much to make them

out of."

"I see," Mrs. Garvey assented, without additional comment. After

pondering a minute or two, she continued cheerfully, "Well, you might

suit. I can't tell, but I'd like to help you. It's hard being without

friends in a big city, and the more I talk to you, the more you remind

me of my sister. I'll write down the address for you anyway. It's

somewhere in West Twenty-third Street. You know your way about, don't

you?"

"Oh, I'll find it. People are good about directing me, especially the

policemen."

"Well, be sure you don't go until after six o'clock. Then the other

girls will be gone, and she will have more time to attend to you. But

you mustn't set your heart on this place. She may have taken on someone

since I talked with her."

Dorinda smiled. No, she wouldn't set her heart on it. "I'll go and sit

in a park while I'm waiting," she replied gratefully. "If I'm going to

be a dressmaker, I ought to notice what women are wearing."

With the slip of paper in her purse, and her purse slipped into the

bosom of her dress, she left the shop and followed the street back to

Fifth Avenue. The hour spent with the stranger had restored her

confidence and there was no shadow of discouragement in her mind.

Something told her, she would have said, that her troubles were

beginning to mend. "I can sew well enough when I try, even if I don't

like it," she thought. "Ma taught me how to make neat buttonholes, and I

can run up a seam as well as any one."

As she approached Fifth Avenue she began to observe the way the women

were dressed, and for the first time since she left Pedlar's Mill she

felt old-fashioned and provincial. The younger women who passed her were

all wearing enormous balloon sleeves and bell skirts, which were held up

with the newest twist by tightly gloved hands. Now and then, she

noticed, the sleeves were made of a different material from the dress,

but the gloves were invariably of white kid, and the small coquettish

hats were perched very high above crisply waved hair which was worn

close at the temples.

In spite of her blistered feet, she walked on rapidly, lifting her face

to the wind, which blew strong and fresh over the lengthening shadows.

How high and smooth and round the sky looked over the steep brown

houses! Presently, from a hotel of grey stone, as gloomy as a prison, a

gaily dressed girl flitted out into a hansom cab which was waiting in

front of the door. There was a vision of prune-coloured velvet sleeves

in a dress of grey satin, of a skirt that rustled in eddying folds over

the pavement, and of a jingling gold chatelaine attached to the front of

a pointed basque. "How happy she must be," Dorinda thought, "dressed

like that, and with everything on earth that she wants!"

She had turned to move on again, when a man carrying a basket of

evergreens brushed against her, and she saw that he was engaged in

replenishing the stone window boxes on the ground floor of the hotel. As

she passed, a whiff of wet earth penetrated her thoughts, and

immediately, in a miracle of recollection, she was back at Five Oaks in

the old doctor's retreat. Every detail of that stormy afternoon started

awake as if it had been released from a spell of enchantment. She saw

the darkened room, lighted by the thin blue flame from the resinous

pine; she saw the one unshuttered window, with the hunched box-bush and

the white turkeys beyond; she heard the melancholy patter of the rain on

the shingled roof; and she watched the old man's face, every line and

blotch distorted by the quivering light, while he wagged his drunken

head at her. A shudder jerked through her limbs. Her memory, which was

beginning to heal, was suddenly raw again. Would she never be free? Was

she doomed to bear that moment of all the moments in her life wherever

she went? Her courage faded now as if the sun had gone under a cloud.

She had been dragged back by the wind, by an odour, into the suffocating

atmosphere of the past. Though her body was walking the city street, in

her memory she was rushing out of that old house at Five Oaks. She was

running into the mist; she was hurrying down the sandy road through the

bulrushes; she was crouching by the old stump, with the wet leaves in

her face and that suspense more terrible than any certainty in her mind.

She listened again for the turn of the wheels, the clink of the mare's

shoes; the slip and scramble in the mud holes; the hollow sound of hoofs

striking on rock. . . .

Never in her life had she been so tired. In an effort to shake her

thoughts free from despair, she quickened her pace, and looked about for

a bench where she could rest. On the opposite side of Fifth Avenue a row

of cab horses waited near a statue under some fine old trees. She had

never seen the name of the square, but it appeared restful in the

afternoon light; and crossing the street, she found a place in the shade

on a deserted bench. It was five o'clock now, and Mrs. Garvey had told

her not to go to see the dressmaker until six. Well, it was a relief to

sit down. Slipping off her shoes, she pushed them under the bench and

spread her wide skirt over her feet. The quiet was pleasant in the

moving shadows of the trees. From where and how far, she wondered, did

the people come who were lounging on the benches around her? So many

people in New York were always resting, but she concluded that they must

have money put by or they couldn't afford to spend so much time doing

nothing.

Gradually, while she sat there, watching the sparrows fluttering round

the nose bags of the horses, hollow phrases, without meaning and without

sequence, swarmed into her mind. Five o'clock. At home her mother would

be getting ready for supper. That grey and white cat had made her think

of Flossie. They were alike as two peas. Remembering the old man had

upset her. She must put him out of her mind. You couldn't change things

by thinking. How could horses feed in those nose bags? What would Dan

and Beersheba think of them? There was another woman with velvet sleeves

in a silk dress. How Miss Seena would exclaim if you told her that so

many women were wearing sleeves of different material from their

dresses! That flaring collar of lace was pretty though. . . . The way

the old man had leered at her over the whiskey bottle. "He's coming back

this evening. He went away to be married." No, she must stop thinking

about it. If she could only blot it all out of her memory. The buildings

in New York were so high. She wondered people weren't afraid to go to

the top of them. There was a poor-looking old man on the bench by the

fountain. In rags and with the soles dropping away from his shoes.

People were rich in New York, but they were poor too. Nobody but Black

Tom, the county idiot, wore rags like that at Pedlar's Mill. How her

feet ached! Would they ever stop hurting? . . . "He went away to be

married. He went away to be married." How dark the room was growing, and

how black the box-bush looked in the slanting rain beyond the window.

Feet were pattering on the shingled roof, or was it only the rain? . . .

It was getting late. Almost time to go to the dressmaker's. Suppose the

dressmaker were to take a fancy to her. Such things happened in books.

"You are the very girl I am looking for. One who isn't afraid to work."

There was a fortune, she had heard, in dressmaking in New York. Miss

Seena knew of a dressmaker who kept her own carriage. . . . How funny

those lights were coming out in the street! They were winking at her,

one after another. It was time to be going; but she didn't feel as if

she could stir a step. Her knees and elbows were full of pins and

needles. It's resting that makes you know how tired you are, her mother

used to say. . . .

Suddenly nausea washed over her like black water, rising from her body

to her exhausted brain. She could scarcely sit there, holding tight to

the bench, while this icy tide swept her out into an ocean of space. The

noises of the city grew fainter, receding from her into the grey fog

which muffled the sky, the lights, the tall buildings, the vehicles in

the street. It would be dreadful if she were sick here in the square,

with that ugly old man and all the cab drivers staring at her. . . . Then

the sickness passed as quickly as it had come; and leaning back against

the bench, she closed her eyes until she should be able to get up and

start on again. After a minute or two, she felt so much better that she

slipped her feet into her shoes, fastened the buttons with a hairpin,

and rising slowly and awkwardly, walked across the square to the nearest

corner.

The noises, which had almost died away, became gradually louder. There

was a tumult of drums in the air, but she could not tell whether the

beating was in her ears or a parade was marching by somewhere in the

distance. Evidently it was a procession, though she could see nothing

except the moving line of vehicles in the street, which had left the

ground and were swimming in some opaque medium between earth and sky.

"How queer everything looks," she thought. "It must be the lights that

never stop winking."

She put her foot cautiously down from the curb, imagining, though she

could not see it, that the street must be somewhere in front of her. As

she made a step forward into the traffic, the sickness swept over her

again, and an earthquake seemed to fling the pavement up against the

back of her head. She saw the lights splinter like glass when it is

smashed; she heard the drums of the invisible procession marching toward

her; she tried to struggle up, to call out, to move her arms, and with

the effort, she dropped into unconsciousness.

II

She opened her eyes and looked at the white walls, white beds, white

screens, white sunlight through the windows, and women in white caps and

dresses moving silently about with white vessels in their hands.

"Why, this must be a hospital," she thought. "How on earth did I come

here?"

Her arm, lying outside the sheet, looked blue and cold and felt as if it

did not belong to her. She could not turn her head because it was

bandaged, and when, after an eternity of effort, she succeeded in

lifting her hand, she discovered that her hair had been cut away on one

side. Closing her eyes again, she lay without thinking, without

stirring, without feeling, while she let life cover her slowly in a warm

flood. The blessed relief was that nothing mattered; nothing that had

happened or could ever happen mattered at all. After the months when she

had cared so intensely, it was like the peace of the Sabbath not to care

any longer, neither to worry nor to wonder about the future.

"I must have hurt myself when I fell," she said.

To her surprise a voice close by the bed answered, "Yes, you fainted in

the street and a cab struck you. You have been ill, but you're getting

all right now."

A man was standing beside her, a large, ruddy, genial-looking man, with

a brown beard and the kindest eyes she had ever seen. He wore a red and

black tie and there was a square gold medal hanging from his

watch chain.

"Have I been here long?" she asked, and her voice sounded so queer that

she couldn't believe it had come out of her lips.

"A week to-day. It will be another week at least before you're strong

enough to be out."

"Was I very ill?"

"At first. We had to operate. That's why your head is shaved on one

side. But you came through splendidly," he added in his hearty manner.

"You have a superb constitution."

For an instant she pondered this. "Are you the doctor?" she inquired

presently.

"I am Doctor Faraday." His hand was on her wrist and he was smiling at

her as if he hadn't a care or a qualm.

She wondered if he knew anything about her. He appeared so big and wise

and strong that he might have known all there was to know about

everybody.

"Is there anything that worries you?" he asked gently, with his air of

taking the world and all it contained as an inexhaustible joke. She

shook her head as well as she could for the bandages, which made all her

movements seem clumsy and unnatural. "I was just thinking----"

"Do you remember where you were going when you were knocked down?"

She met his eyes candidly, yielding her will to the genial strength of

his personality. "I was looking for work. There was a dressmaker in West

Twenty-third Street. She will have filled the place by now."

"You mustn't worry about that." She liked the way the wrinkles gathered

about his merry grey eyes. "Don't worry about anything. We'll see that

you have something to do as soon as you're strong enough. Meanwhile,

just lie still and get well. Keep a stiff upper lip," he concluded, with

a subdued laugh which would have boomed out if he hadn't suppressed it.

"That's the only way to meet life. Keep a stiff upper lip," he concluded

with a subdued laugh which would have boomed out if he hadn't suppressed

it. "That's the only way to meet life. Keep a stiff upper lip."

"I can't help thinking,"--she glanced weakly about the room, where the

white iron beds--they were the smallest beds she had ever seen--stood in

a row. "Is this a charity place?"

"Now, I told you not to worry. No, we don't call it charity, but there

is no charge for those who need treatment and cannot afford to pay for

it. We don't expect you to be one of the rich patients. Is there

anything else?"

She tried again to shake her head. All at once she had forgotten what

she wanted to know. She was too weak to remember things, even important

things. There was a pain at the back of her head, and this pain was

shooting in wires down her neck and through her shoulders to her spine.

Nothing made any difference.

"Don't make an effort. Don't try to talk," he said, and turned away to

one of the beds by the door.

Hours later, when one of the nurses brought her a cup of broth, she

struggled to speak collectedly. "What did the doctor tell me his name

is? I don't seem to remember things."

"That's because you're still weak. His name is Faraday. He is a

celebrated surgeon, and he operated on you because he brought you to the

hospital. He was driving by when you were struck. The operation saved

your life."

"Does he come often?"

"Not as a rule. He hasn't time to visit the patients. But he is

interested in your case. It is an unusual one, and he is very much

interested."

"Does he know who I am?"

"Yes, the woman you rented a room from read about the accident in the

papers, and came to identify you. Can you remember anything of this last

week?"

"Only that my head hurt me. Yes, and figures passing to and fro against

white walls."

"It was a wonder you weren't killed. But you're all right now. You'll be

as well as you ever were in a little while."

"I feel so queer with my head shaved. I can feel it even with the

bandages."

"That will soon be well, and the scar won't show at all under your hair.

You've everything to be thankful for," the nurse concluded in a brisk

professional tone.

Dorinda was gazing up at her with a strange, groping expression. Her

eyes, large, blue, and wistful in the pallor of her face, appeared to

have drained all the vitality from her body. "There was something I

wanted to ask the doctor," she began. "I don't seem to be able to

remember what it was. . . ."

"Don't remember," replied the nurse with authority. She hesitated an

instant, and stared down into the empty cup. Then, after reflection, she

continued clearly and firmly, "It won't hurt you to know that you have

been very ill, now that you are getting well again?"

Dorinda's features, except for her appealing eyes, were without

expression. Yes, she remembered now; she knew what she had wished to

ask, "Oh, no, it won't hurt me," she answered.

"Well, I thought you'd take it sensibly." After waiting a moment to

watch the effect of her words, the nurse turned away and walked briskly

out of the ward.

Lying there in her narrow bed, Dorinda repeated slowly, "I thought you

would feel that way about it." Words, like ideas, were dribbling back

into her mind; but she seemed to be learning them all over again.

Relief, in which there was a shade of inexplicable regret, tinged her

thoughts. She would have liked a child if it had been all hers, with

nothing to remind her of Jason. For a second she had a vision of it,

round, fair and rosy. Then, "it might have had red hair," she reminded

herself, "and I should have hated it."

Relief and regret faded together. She closed her eyes and lay helpless,

while the stream of memory, now muddy, now clear, flowed through her

into darkness. At first this stream was mere swirling blackness, swift,

deep, torrential as a river in flood. Then gradually the rushing noise

passed away, and the stream became lighter and clearer, and bore

fragmentary, rapidly moving images on its surface. Some of these images

floated through her in obscurity; others shone out brightly and steadily

as long as they remained within range of her vision; but one and all,

they came in fragments and floated on before she could grasp the

complete outline. Nothing was whole. Nothing lasted. Nothing was related

to anything else.

Thirst. Would they soon bring her something to drink? The old well

bucket at home. The mossy brim; the cool slippery feeling of the sides;

the turning of the rope as it went down; the dark greenish depths, when

one looked over, with the gleaming ripple, like a drowned star, at the

bottom. Cool places. Violets growing in hollows. A hollow at Whistling

Spring, where she had stepped on a snake in the tall weeds. What was it

she couldn't remember about snakes? Something important, but she had

forgotten it. "I've always funked things." Who said that? Why was that

woman moaning so behind the screen in the corner? . . . The snake had come

back now. Jason had put his hand on a snake, and that was why everything

else had happened. If Jason hadn't put his hand on a snake when he was a

child, he would never have deserted her, she would never have been

picked up in the street, she would not be lying now in a hospital with

half of her hair shaved away. How ridiculous that sounded when one

thought of it; yet it was true. What was it her mother said so often?

The ways of Providence are past finding out. . . . The nurse again. Oh,

yes, water. . . .

The morning when she sat up for the first time, Doctor Faraday stayed

longer than usual and asked her a number of questions. She felt quite at

home with him. "When any one has saved your life, I suppose he feels

that you have a claim on him," she thought; and she replied as

accurately as she could to whatever he asked. Naturally reticent, she

found now that she suffered from a nervous inability to express any

emotion. She could talk freely of external objects, of the hospital, the

nurses, the other patients in the ward; but constraint sealed her lips

when she endeavoured to put feeling into words.

"When you are discharged, I think we can find a place for you," said

Doctor Faraday. "My wife is coming to talk to you. We've been looking

for a girl to stay in my office in the morning and help with the

children in the afternoon. Not a nurse, you know. The office nurse has

other duties; but some one to receive the patients and make

appointments."

She looked at him incredulously. "You aren't just making it up?" With a

laugh he ignored the question. "You haven't any plans?"

"Oh, no. It will be too late to go to the dressmaker, and besides she

might not have wanted me."

"You are sure you don't wish to go home?"

She gazed at his firm fleshy face, over which the clean shining skin was

drawn so smoothly that it looked as if it were stretched; the thick

brown hair, just going grey and divided by a pink part in the centre;

the crisp beard, clipped close on the cheeks and rounding to a point at

the chin. Yes, she liked his face. It was a comfortable face to watch,

and she had never seen hands like his before, large, strong,

mysteriously beneficent hands.

"No," she answered in her reserved voice, "I can't go back yet."

If she went back, she should be obliged to face the red chimneys of Five

Oaks, the burned cabin, and the place where she had sat and waited for

Jason's return. These things were still there, perpetual and unchanged.

"I've talked to my wife about you," Doctor Faraday said. "I believe you

are a good girl, and we both wish to help you to lead a good life."

"You've been so kind," she responded. "I can't tell you what I feel, but

I do feel that. I want you to know."

"My dear girl." He bent over and touched her hand. "I know it. If you'd

had as much experience with emotional women as I've had, you'd

understand the blessedness of reserve. Wait till you see my wife. You'll

find her easy to talk to. Every one does."

A few mornings afterwards, as she was preparing to get up, Mrs. Faraday

came and sat by the little bed. She was a plump, maternal-looking woman,

with an ample figure, which did not conform to the wasp waist of the

period, and a round pink face, to which her tightly crimped hair and

small fashionable hat lent an air of astonishment, as if she were

thinking continually, "I didn't know I looked like this." Her mantle was

of claret-coloured broadcloth heavily garnished with passementerie, and

she wore very short white kid gloves, above which her plump wrists

bulged in infantile creases. While she sat there, panting a little from

her tight stays and her unnatural elegance, Dorinda gazed at her

sympathetically and thought it was a pity that she did her hair in a way

that made her temples look skinned.

"Doctor Faraday is very much interested in your case," she began in a

voice that was as fresh and sweet as her complexion. "He has been so

kind to me."

"We both wish to help you, and we think it might be good for you to take

the place in his office for a little while--a few weeks," she added

cautiously, "until you are able to find something else. In that way the

doctor can keep an eye on you until you are well again. Of course the

work will be light. He has a nurse and a secretary. However, you could

help with the children after the office hours are over. The nurse and

Miss Murray, the governess, take them to the Park every afternoon; but

there are six of them, and we can't have too much help. That's a large

family for New York," she finished gaily.

"We have much larger ones at Pedlar's Mill. The Garlicks were twelve

until one died last year, and old Mrs. Flower, the Mother of the

auctioneer, had thirteen children."

"You like children?"

"Oh, yes, I like children." She couldn't put any enthusiasm into her

voice, and she hated herself for the lack of it. She was dead, turned

into stone or wood, and she didn't really care about anything. Did she

or did she not like children? She couldn't have answered the question

truthfully if her life had depended upon it. In her other existence she

had liked them; but that was so long ago and far away that it had no

connection with her now.

"Then that is settled." What a happy manner Mrs. Faraday had! "The nurse

tells me you are leaving to-morrow. Will you come straight to us or

would you like a day to yourself?"

"A day to myself, if you don't mind. I ought to get a dress, oughtn't

I?"

"Oh, any plain simple dress will do. Navy blue poplin with white linen

collar and cuffs would be nice. But don't tire yourself or spend any

money you can't afford. Well arrange all that later."

Mrs. Faraday had risen and was holding out one firmly gloved hand. As

she grasped it, Dorinda could feel the soft flesh beneath the deeply

embedded buttons. "Then I'll look for you day after to-morrow," said the

older woman in her sprightly tone. "Navy blue will look well on you with

your hair and eyes," she added encouragingly. "I always liked blue eyes

and black hair."

Dorinda smiled up at her. "And now half my hair is gone. I must look a

fright, and the scar isn't even hidden. I'll be marked all my life."

"Oh, but your hair will come back thicker than ever. Even now your scalp

is covered, and in a little while no one will know that there is a

scar." She beamed down on the bed. "Here is the address. Have you a

place you can put the card, so it won't slip away?"

"I've got my purse under my pillow." As Dorinda drew out the little

leather bag, and slipped the card into it, she thought wearily, "How

funny it is that this should have happened to me."

Since her illness, the whole of life, all she had gone through, all she

saw around her, all feeling everywhere, appeared less tragic than

ludicrous. Though her capacity for emotion was dead, some diabolical

sense of humour had sprung up like, fireweed from the ruins. She could

laugh at everything now, but it was ironic laughter.

III

Her first thought, when she opened her eyes the next morning, was that

she was free to leave the hospital as soon as she pleased. If only she

might have stayed there until she died, tranquil, indifferent, with

nothing left but this sardonic humour. A little later, as she glanced at

the other patients in the ward, at the woman who moaned incessantly and

at the young girl, with flaming red hair, who had lost her leg in an

accident, she told herself that there were people in the world who were

worse off than she was. Through the high window she could see that the

sky was clear, and that a strong breeze was blowing a flag on the top of

a grey tower. She was glad it was not raining. It would have been a pity

to go back into the world on a wet day.

After she had had her breakfast, and a glib young doctor had given her

some directions, she got out of bed and a pupil nurse helped her to

dress. They had arranged, she discovered presently, that a friend of one

of the other patients--the moaning woman, it soon appeared--should go

with her as far as her lodging-house. That was the stranger's way also,

and she had promised to see that Dorinda reached her room safely.

"Do they know that you are coming?"

"Yes, the nurse telephoned for me. I can get the sane room, and they've

put my bag in it."

"Well, I'll be glad to go with you," said the woman, a depressed-looking

person, in rusty mourning. "You must be careful about crossing the

street while you're so weak."

"I don't feel as if I could walk a step," Dorinda answered, sinking into

a chair while she dressed.

Her street clothes were so uncomfortable that she wondered how she could

ever have worn them. Her stockings were too large, and the feet of them

were drawn out of shape; her dress felt as if it weighed tons. But her

hair troubled her most. No matter how hard she tried, she could not make

it look neat. So much of it had been cut away on the right side that she

was obliged to wind what was left into a thin twist and fasten it like a

wreath round her head. Her face was thin and pallid, just the shape and

colour of an egg, she thought despondently, and "I'm all eyes," she

added, while she gazed at herself in the small mirror.

It was late afternoon when she left the hospital, leaning on the arm of

the stranger, who remarked with every other step, "I hope you ain't

beginning to feel faint," or, "You'd better take it more slowly." The

bereaved woman was provided with a collection of gruesome anecdotes,

which she related with relish while they crept along the cross street in

the direction of Sixth Avenue. "There ain't much I don't know about

operations," she concluded at the end of her recital.

As the air brushed her face, Dorinda's first sensation was a physical

response to the invigorating frostiness. Then it seemed to her that

whenever she took a step forward the pavement rose slightly and slid up

to meet her. In so short a time she had forgotten the way to walk, and

she felt troubled because in her case the law of gravitation appeared to

be arbitrarily suspended. When she put her foot out, she did not know,

she told herself, whether it would have the weight to come down or would

go floating up into the air. "Could anything have happened to my brain,"

she wondered, "when I was struck on the head?" In a little while,

however, the sensation of lightness gave place to the more familiar one

of strained muscles. Though she could walk easily now, she was beginning

to feel very tired, and she could barely do more than crawl over the

long block.

A high wind was blowing from the west, billowing the sleeves and skirts

of women's dresses, whipping the dust into waves, and tossing the gay

streamers in Fifth Avenue. The sunlight appeared to splinter as it

struck against the crystal blue of the sky and to scatter a shower of

sparkling drops on the city. Though it was all bright, gay, beautiful,

to Dorinda the scene might have been made of glass in the windy hollow

of the universe. "I'm dried up at the core," she thought, "and yet, I've

got to go on pretending that I'm alive, that I'm like other people." She

felt nothing; she expected nothing; she desired nothing; and this

insensibility, which was worse than pain, had attacked her body as well

as her heart and mind. "If somebody were to stick a pin in me, I

shouldn't feel it," she told herself. "I'm no better than a dead tree

walking."

At the corner of Sixth Avenue, a gust of wind struck her sharply, and

still leaning on the arm of her companion, she drew back into the

shelter of a shop.

"Let's stand here until the next car comes."

"Do you feel any worse?"

"No, not worse, only different."

"I've known 'em to faint dead away the first time they left the

hospital."

"Well, I've no idea of fainting. Just tell me when you see the right car

coming."

The thing that worried her most, and she had puzzled over this from the

minute she came down the steps of the hospital, was the curious

impression in her mind that she had seen everything and everybody

before. Every face was familiar to her. She seemed to have known each

person who passed her in some former time and place, which she dimly

remembered; and each reminded her, in some vague resemblance of contour,

feature, or shifting expression, of the way Jason had looked when she

first loved him. "Just as I was trying to forget him," she thought, with

irritation, "everybody begins to look like him."

When the car came, and she got on and found a seat beside a fat German,

who was buried in his newspaper, this senseless irritation still

persisted. "Maybe if I stop looking at their faces and keep my eyes

fixed on their clothes, the resemblance will pass away," she told

herself resolutely. "What a funny hat, just like a cabbage, that woman

is wearing, and the man with her has on a tie like a little boy's. He

must be an artist. I read in some book that artists wore velvet coats

and flowing ties." Then, inadvertently, she raised her eyes to the face

of the stranger, and discovered that he was gazing at her with a look

that reminded her of Jason. Even the fat German wore a familiar

expression when he turned to touch the bell and glanced down at her as

he rose to go out of the car.

At the lodging-house, where she had to explain her case all over again,

she was still haunted by this delusive resemblance. There might have

been a general disintegration and reassembling of personalities since

she had gone to the hospital, and she felt that she had seen them all

before in other circumstances and other periods.

Alone, at last, in her little room, she dropped wearily on the hard bed,

which, like the wife of the proprietor, bulged in the wrong places, and

lay, without seeing or hearing, surrendered to the grey hollowness of

existence. Sheer physical weakness kept her motionless for an hour; and

when at the end of that time, she lifted her hands to take off her hat,

she felt as if she were recovering from the effects of an anæsthetic.

Gradually, as the stupor wore off, she became aware of the objects

around her; of the hissing gas jet, which burned in the daytime; of the

dirty carpet, with an ink splotch in the centre; of the unsteady

washstand that creaked under its own weight; of the stale ashes of a

cigar in the top of the soap dish; of the sharp ridge down the middle of

the bed on which she was lying. And she thought clearly, "No matter how

bad it is, I've got to go through with it."