They were still talking when Larimore came home, surprised and a shade
annoyed when he found that Eileen was there. He had but two tickets,
and he wanted to be alone with his wife.
“Don’t tell him,” the girl whispered when he left the room to dress
for dinner. “He is just beginning to respect me a little. I so want
his--respect.”
When dinner was over she went to her room. No, she was not ill. She
only wanted to be alone. If Lary had planned an evening at the theatre,
thinking that she would spend the night at Rye, there was no reason for
a change in his plans. She was glad they were going out, so that she
might be alone. She knew the meaning of _hypsos_, now that she had made
the descent, within the brief space of an hour, from that height to
_bathos_, the lowest depth of sordid physical reality. She wanted to
play again the winged notes that had carried her beyond the farthest
reach of her own being--to purge her soul of the earth-taint that was
in her.
“You are perfectly sure you are all right?” Judith asked when she told
her good-night. “You won’t brood or cry?”
“No, I am past all that. When you strike bottom--there isn’t any
farther to go.”