At ten o'clock on a bright June morning Helen Kennedy tip-toed across a
darkened bedroom and closed its door softly behind her. Her tenseness
relaxed with a sigh of relief when the door shut with the tiniest of
muffled clicks and the stillness behind its panels remained unbroken.
Sunlight streamed through the windows of the sitting-room, throwing
a quivering pattern of the lace curtains on the velvet carpet and
kindling a glow of ruddy color where it touched mahogany chairs and a
corner of the big library table. She moved quickly to one of the broad
windows and carefully raised a lower sash. The low roar of the stirring
city rushed in like the noise of breakers on a far-away beach, and
clean, tingling air poured upon her. She breathed it in deeply, drawing
the blue silk negligée closer about her throat.
The two years that had whirled past since she became Bert Kennedy's
wife had taught her many things. She had drawn from her experience
generalities on men, women, life, which made her feel immeasurably
older and wiser. But there were problems that she had not solved,
points at which she felt herself at fault, and they troubled her
vaguely while she stood twisting the cord of the window-shade in her
hand and gazing out at the many-windowed buildings of San Francisco.
She had learned that men loved women for being beautiful, gay,
unexacting, sweet-tempered always, docile without being bores. She had
learned that men were infuriated by three things; questions, babies,
and a woman who was ill. She had learned that success in business
depended upon "putting up a front" and that a woman's part was to help
in that without asking why or for what end. She had learned that the
deepest need of her own nature was to be able to look up to the man she
loved, even though she must go down on her own knees in order to do it.
She knew that she adored her husband blindly, passionately, and that
she dared not open her eyes for fear she would cease to do so.
But she had not quite been able to fit herself into a life with him.
She had not learned what to do with these morning hours while he was
asleep; she had not learned to occupy all her energies in useless
activities while he was away; in a word, she did not know what to do
with the part of her life he did not want, and she could not compel
herself to be satisfied in doing nothing with it.
Gathering up the trailing silks of her nightgown and negligée she went
back to the pile of magazines and books on the table. She did not
exactly want to read; reading seemed to her as out of place in the
morning as soup for breakfast. But she could not go out, for at any
moment Bert might wake and call to her, and she could not dress, for
he saw a reproach in that, and was annoyed. She turned over the books
uncertainly, selecting at last a curious one called "Pragmatism," which
had fascinated her when she dipped into its pages in the library. She
had it in her hand when the door-bell rang loudly.
She stood startled, clutching the book against her breast. Her heart
beat thickly, and the color faded from her face and then poured back in
a burning flush. The bell rang again more imperatively. The very sound
of it proclaimed that it was rung by a collector. Was it the taxi-cab
man, the tailor, the collection agency? She could not make herself go
to the door, and the third long, insistent peal of the bell wrung her
like the tightening of a rack. It would waken Bert, but what further
excuse could she make to the grimly insulting man she visualized on the
other side of the door? The bell continued to ring.
After a long time it was silent, and she heard the slam of the
automatic elevator's door. A second later she heard Bert's voice.
"Helen! Helen! What the devil?"
She opened the bedroom door and stood smiling brightly on the
threshold. "'Morning, Bert dear! Behold, the early bird's gone with his
bill still open!"
"Well, why the hell didn't you open the door and tell him to stop that
confounded noise? Were you afraid of disturbing him?"
He knew how it hurt her, but she was trained not to show it. It
appeared to her now that she had been criminally selfish in not
guarding Bert's sleep. She saw herself a useless incumbrance to her
husband's career, costing him a great deal and doing nothing whatever
to repay him.
"That's the trouble--it wouldn't have disturbed him a bit!" she laughed
bravely. "Somebody ought to catch a collector and study the species and
find out what will disturb 'em. I think they're made of cast-iron. I
wonder does collecting run in families, or do they just catch 'em young
and harden them."
Sometimes even in the mornings talk like this made him smile. But this
morning he only growled unintelligibly, turning his head on the pillow.
She went softly past the bed into the dressing-room.
Bert had scouted her idea of getting an apartment with a kitchenette.
He said he had not married a cook, and he hated women with burned
complexions and red hands. He made her feel plebeian and common in
preferring a home to a hotel. But she had found when she interviewed
the apartment-house manager and had spent a happy morning buying a
coffee percolator and dainty cups and napkins, that he did not mind
her giving him coffee in bed. She found a deep pleasure in doing it.
The percolator stood behind a screen in the dressing-room. She turned
on the electric switch and, sitting down before the mirror, took off
her lace cap and released her hair from its curlers. Bert liked her
hair curled. Its dark mist framed a face that she regarded anxiously
in the mirror. The features had sharpened a little, and her complexion
had lost a shade of its freshness. Bert would insist on her drinking
with him, and she knew she must do it to keep her hold on him. A sense
of the unreasonableness of men in loving women for their beauty and
then destroying it came into her mind, nebulous, almost a thought. But
she disregarded it, from a habit she had formed of disregarding many
things, and began combing and coiling her hair, carefully inspecting
the result from all angles with a hand mirror.
A few minutes later she came into the bedroom, carrying a tray and
kicking the trailing lengths of her negligée before her. She held the
tray in one hand while she cleared the bedside table with the other,
and when she had poured the coffee she went through the sitting-room
and brought in the morning paper. It had been the taxi-cab man. His
bill, stuck in the crack of the door, fluttered down when she opened
it, and after glancing at the figures hastily, she thrust it out of
sight.
Bert was sitting up in bed, drinking his coffee, and the smile he threw
at her made her happy. She curled on the bed beside his drawn-up knees
and, taking her own cup from the tray, smiled at him in turn. She never
loved him more than at such moments as this, when his rumpled hair
and the eyes miraculously cleared and softened by sleep made him seem
almost boyish.
"Good?"
"You're some little chef when it comes to coffee!" he replied. "It hits
the spot." He yawned. "Good Lord, we must have had a time last night!
Did I fight a chauffeur or did I dream it?"
"It was only a--rather a--dispute," she said hurriedly.
"That little blond doll was some baby!"
He could not intend to be so cruel, not even to punish her for letting
the bell waken him. It was only that he liked to feel his own power
over her. He cared only for women that he could control, and she knew
that it was the constant struggle between them, in which he was always
victorious, that gave her her greatest hold on him. But it did hurt her
cruelly in this moment of security to be reminded of the dangers that
always threatened that hold.
"Oh, stunning!" she agreed, keeping her eyes clear and smiling. She
would not fall into the error and the confession of being catty. But
she felt that he perceived her motive, and she knew that in any case
he held the advantage over her. She was in the helpless position of the
one who gives the greater love.
They sipped their coffee in silence broken only by the crackling of the
newspaper. Then, pushing it away, he set down his cup and leaned back
against the pillows, his hands behind his head. A moment had arrived in
which she could talk to him, and behind her carefully casual manner her
nerves tightened.
"It was pretty good coffee," she remarked. "You know, I think it would
be fun if we had a real place, with a breakfast-room, don't you? Then
we'd have grape-fruit and hot muffins and all that sort of thing, too.
I'd like to have a place like that. And then we'd have parties," she
added hastily. "We could keep them going all night long if we wanted to
in our own place."
He yawned.
"Dream on, little one," he said. But his voice was pleasant.
"Now listen, dear. I really mean it. We could do it. It wouldn't be a
bit more trouble to you than a hotel, really. I'd see that it wasn't. I
really want it awfully badly. I know you'd like it if you'd just let me
try it once. You don't know how nice I'd make it for you."
His silence was too careless to be antagonistic, but he was listening.
She was encouraged.
"You don't realize how much time I have when you're gone. I could keep
a house running beautifully, and you'd never even see the wheels go
round. I--"
"A house!" He was aroused. "Great Scott, doesn't it cost enough for the
two of us to live as it is? Don't you make my life miserable whining
about bills?"
The color came into her cheeks, but she had never risked letting
herself feel resentment at anything he chose to say. She laughed
quite naturally. "My goodness!" she said. "You're talking as if I
were a puppy! I've never whined a single whine; it's the howling of
the collectors you've heard. Let 'em howl; it's good enough for 'em!
No, but really, sweetheart, please just let me finish. I've thought
it all out. You don't know what a good manager I am." She hurried on,
forestalling the words on his lips. "You don't know how much I want to
be just a little bit of help. I can't be much, I know. But I'm sure I
could save money--"
"Old stuff!" he interrupted. "It isn't the money you save; it's the
money you make that counts."
"I know!" she agreed quickly. "But we could get a house, we could buy
a house, for less than we're paying here in rent. A very nice house. I
wouldn't ask you to do it, if it cost any more than we're spending now.
But--of course I don't know anything about such things--but I should
think it would give you an advantage in business if you owned some
property. Wouldn't--wouldn't it--make people put more confidence--" She
faltered miserably at the look in his eyes, and before he could speak
she had changed her tactics, laughing.
"I'm just trying to tease you into giving me something I want, and I
know I'm awfully silly about it." She nestled closer to him, slipping
an arm under his neck. "Oh, honey, it wouldn't cost anything at all,
and I do so want to have a house to do things to. I feel so--so
unsettled, living this way. I feel as if I were always sitting on the
edge of a chair waiting to go somewhere else. And I'm used to working
and--and managing a little money. I know it wasn't much money, but I
liked to do it. You're letting a lot of perfectly good energy go to
waste in me, really you are."
He laughed, tightening his arm about her shoulders, and for one
deliriously happy moment she thought she had won. Then he kissed her,
and before he spoke she knew she had lost.
"I should worry! You're giving me all I want," he said, and there
was different delight in the words. She was satisfying him, and for
the moment it was enough. He made the mistake of overconfidence in
emphasizing a point already won and so losing it.
"And as long as I'm giving you three meals a day and glad rags, it
isn't up to you to worry. I'll look after the finances if you'll take
care of your complexion. It's beginning to need it," he added with
brutality that defeated its own purpose. Even in her pain she had an
instant of seeing him clearly and feeling that she hated him.
She slipped to her feet and stood trembling, not looking down at him.
"Well, that's settled, then," she said in a clear, hard little voice.
"I'll go and dress. It's nearly noon."
She felt that her own anger was threatening the most precious thing in
her life; she felt that she was two persons who were tearing each other
to pieces. With a blind instinct of reaching out to him for help she
turned at the dressing-room door. "I know you don't realize what you're
doing to me--you don't realize--what you're throwing away," she said.
There was a cool amusement in his eyes.
"Well, but why the melodrama?" he asked reasonably. She stood convicted
of hysteria and stupidity, and she felt again his superiority and his
mastery over her.
When she came from the dressing-room to find him, careless,
good-humored, handsome, tugging his tie into its knot before the
mirror, she knew that nothing mattered except that she loved him and
that she must hold his love for her. She came close to him, longing
for a reassurance that she would not ask. Unless he gave it to her,
left her with it to hold in her heart, she would be tortured by
miserable doubts and flickering jealousies until he came back. She
would be tied to the telephone, waiting for a call from him, trying to
follow in her imagination the intricate business affairs from which she
was shut out, telling herself that it was business and nothing else
that kept him from her.
"Well, bye-bye," he said, putting on his hat.
"Good-by." Her voice was like a detaining hand. "You--you won't be gone
long?"
He relented.
"I'm going down to see Clark & Hayward. I'm going to put through a deal
with them that'll put us on velvet," he declared.
"Clark & Hayward? They're the real-estate people?"
"You're some little guesser. They certainly are. We're going to be
millionaires when I get through with them! Farewell!"
The very door seemed to click triumphantly behind him, and she heard
him whistling while he waited for the elevator. When he appeared on the
sidewalk below, she was leaning from the window, and she would have
waved to him if he had looked up. Her occupation for the day vanished
when he swung into a street-car and was carried out of sight.
She picked up the pragmatism book again and read a few paragraphs, put
it down restlessly. The untidy bedroom nagged at her nerves, but Bert
was paying for hotel service, and once when she had made the bed he
had told her impatiently that there was no sense in letting the very
servants know she was not used to living decently.
She would go for a walk. There might be something new to see in the
shop windows. She would take the book with her and read it in the dairy
lunch-room where she ate when alone. It seemed criminal to her to spend
money unnecessarily when they owed so much, and she could not help
trying to save it, though all her efforts seemed to make no difference.
If she could have only a small amount of money regularly, she
could manage so much better. Even the salary she had earned as a
telegraph-operator sometimes seemed like riches to her, because she had
known that she would have it every month and had managed it herself.
But every attempt to establish regularity and stability in her present
life ended always in the same failure, and she hurriedly turned even
her slightest thoughts from the memory of conversations like that just
ended.
In the dressing-room she snapped on all the lights and under their
merciless glare critically inspected every line of her face. The
carefully brushed arch of the eyebrows was perfect; the slightest trace
of rouge was spread skillfully on her cheeks, the round point of her
chin, the lobes of her ears. She coaxed loose a tendril of dark hair
and, soaking it with banderine, plastered it against her cheek in a
curve that was the final touch of striking artificiality. She did not
like it, but Bert did.
She took time in adjusting her hat. Everything depended on that, she
knew. She tied her veil with meticulous care. Then, slowly turning
before the long mirror set in the door, she critically inspected every
detail of her costume, the trim little boots, the crisp, even edges of
her skirt, the line of the jacket, the immaculate gloves. A tremendous
amount of thought and effort had gone into the making of that smart
effect, and she felt that she had done a good job. She would still
compare favorably with any of the women Bert might meet. A tiny spark
of cheerfulness was kindled by the thought. She tried to nourish it,
but it went out in dreariness.
What kind of deal was Bert putting through with Clark & Hayward? It
was the first time he had mentioned real estate since the unexplained
failure of his plan to go to Argentine. That was another memory from
which she hastily turned her thoughts, a memory of his alternate
moodiness and wild gaiety, of his angry impatience at her most
tentative show of interest or sympathy, of their ending an ecstatic,
miserable honeymoon by sneaking out of the hotel leaving an unpaid bill
behind them. She still avoided the hotel, though he must long since
have paid the bill. She had not dared ask him, but he had made a great
deal of money since then.
There had been the flurry of excitement about the mining stocks, which
were selling like wild-fire and promised millions until something
happened. And then the scheme for floating a rubber plantation in
Guatemala--his long eastern trip and her diamond ring had come out of
that--and then the affair of the patent monkey-wrench. He had said
again that there were millions in it, and had derided her dislike of
the inventor. She wondered what had become of that enterprise, and
secretly thought that she had been right and that the man had tried to
swindle Bert.
Now it was real estate again. She did not doubt that her clever husband
would succeed in it; she was sure that he would be one of America's
biggest business men some day, when he turned his genius to one line
and followed it with a little more steadiness. But she would have liked
to know more about his business affairs. Since they could not have a
home yet, she would like to be doing something interesting.
She stopped such thoughts with an impatient little mental shake.
Perhaps she would feel better when she had eaten luncheon. With the
book tucked under her arm she walked briskly down the sunny, wind-swept
streets, threading her way indifferently through the tangle of traffic
at the corners with the sixth sense of the city dweller, seeing
without perceiving them the clanging street-cars, the silent, shining
limousines, the streams of cleverly dressed women, preoccupied men,
fluffy dogs on chains, and the panorama of shop-windows filled with
laces, jewels, gowns, furs, hats. She walked surrounded by an isolation
as complete as if she were alone in a forest, and nothing struck
through it until she paused before a window-display of hardware.
She came to that window frequently, drawn by an irresistible
attraction. With a pleasant sense of dissipation she stood before
it, gazing at glittering bathroom fixtures, rank on rank of shining
pans, rows of kitchen utensils, electric flat-irons. To-day there
was a glistening white kitchen cabinet, with ingenious flour-bin and
built-in sifter, hooks for innumerable spoons, sugar and spice jars, an
egg-beater, a market-memorandum device. A tempting yellow bowl stood on
a white shelf.
Some day, she thought, she would have a yellow kitchen. She had in mind
the shade of yellow, a clear yellow, like sunshine. There would be
cream walls and yellow woodwork, at the windows sheer white curtains,
which would wash easily, and on the window-sill a black jar filled with
nasturtiums. The breakfast-room should be a glassed-in porch, and its
curtains should be thin yellow silk, through which the sunshine would
cast a golden light on the little breakfast table spread with a white
embroidered cloth and set with shining silver and china. The coffee
percolator would be bubbling, and the grape-fruit in place, and when
she came from the kitchen with the plate of muffins Bert would look
up from his paper and say, "Muffins again? Fine! You're some little
muffin-maker!"
She dimpled and flushed happily, standing before the unresponsive
sheet of plate glass. Then, with a shrug and a half laugh at herself,
she came back to reality and went on. But the display held her as a
candy-shop holds a child, and she must stop again to look at the next
window, filled with color-cards and cans of paint. Her mind was still
busy with color combinations for a living-room when she entered the
dairy lunch-room and carried her tray to a table.
For a moment she looked at the crowd about her, clerks and shopgirls
and smartly dressed stenographers hurriedly drinking coffee and eating
pie. Then she propped her book against the sugar bowl and began slowly
to eat, turning a page from time to time. This was an astonishing book.
It was not fiction, but it was even more interesting. She read quickly,
skipping the few words she did not understand, grasping their meaning
by a kind of intuition, wondering why she had never before considered
ideas of this kind.
She was so deeply absorbed that she merely felt, without realizing, the
presence of some one hesitating at her elbow, some one who moved past
her to draw out a chair opposite her and set down his tray. She moved
her coffee-cup to make room for it, and apologetically lifted the book
from the sugar bowl, glancing across it to see Paul.
The shock was so great that for an instant she did not move or think.
He stood motionless and stared at her with eyes wiped blank of any
expression. Her cup rattled as the book dropped against it and the
sound roused her. With the sensation of a desperate twist, like that of
a falling cat righting itself in the air, she faced the situation.
"Why--Paul!" she said, and felt that the old name struck the wrong
note. "How you startled me. But of course I'm very glad to see you
again. Do sit down."
In his face she saw clearly his chagrin, his rage at himself for
blundering into this awkwardness, his resolve to see it through. He put
himself firmly into the chair and though his face and even his neck
were red, there was the remembered determination in the set of his lips
and the lift of his chin.
"I'm certainly surprised to see you," he said. "From all I've been
hearing about you I had a notion you never ate in places like this any
more. They tell me you're getting along fine. I'm mighty glad to hear
it." With deliberation he dipped two level spoonfuls of sugar into his
coffee and attacked the triangle of pie.
"Oh, I come in sometimes for a change," she said lightly. "Yes,
everything's fine with me. You're looking well, too."
There was an undeniable air of prosperity about him. His suit was
tailor-made, and the hat on the hook above his head was a new gray felt
of the latest shape. His face had changed very slightly, grown perhaps
a bit fuller than she remembered, and the line of the jaw was squarer.
But he looked at her with the same candid, straight gaze. Of course,
she could not expect warmth in it.
"Well, I can't complain," he said. "Things are going pretty well. Slow,
of course, but still they're coming."
"I'm awfully glad to hear it. Your mother's well?" The situation was
fantastic and ghastly, but she would not escape from it until she could
do so gracefully. She formed the next question in her mind while he
answered that one.
"Do you often get up to the city?"
"Oh, now and then. I only come when I have to. It's too windy and too
noisy to suit me. I just came up this morning to see a real-estate firm
here about a house they've got in Ripley. I'm going back to-night."
"You're buying a house?" she cried in the tone of a child who sees a
toy taken from it. Her anger at her lack of self-control was increased
when she saw that he had misinterpreted her feeling.
"Just to rent," he said hastily. "I'm not thinking of--moving. Mother
and I are satisfied where we are, and I expect it'll be some time
before I get that place paid for. This other house--" It seemed to her
unbearable that he should have two houses. But he went on doggedly,
determined, she saw, to give no impression of a prosperity that was
not his. "I expect you wouldn't think much of it. But there's a big
real-estate firm up here that's going to boom Ripley, and I wanted to
get in on as much of it as I could. They're buying up half the land in
the county, and I had an option on a little piece they wanted, so I
traded it in for this house. I figure I can fix it up some and make a
good thing renting it pretty soon."
She saw that her momentary envy had been absurd. He might have two
houses, but he was only one of the unnumbered customers of a big
real-estate firm. At that moment her husband was dealing as an equal
with the heads of such a firm. There was, of course, no comparison
between the two men, and she made none. The stirring of remembered
affection that she felt for Paul registered in her mind only a pensive
realization of the decay of everything under the erosion of time.
She felt that she was managing the interview very well, and when
she saw Paul resugaring his coffee from time to time, with the same
deliberate measuring of two level spoonfuls, she felt a complex
gratification. She told herself that she did not want Paul to be still
in love with her and unhappy, but there was a pleasure in seeing this
evidence that his agitation was greater than hers. Being ashamed of the
emotion did not kill it.
He told her, with an attempt to control his pride, that he was no
longer with the railroad company. The man who "just about owned Ripley"
had given him a better job. He was in charge of the ice-plant and
lumber-yard now, and he was getting a hundred and fifty a month. He
mentioned the figures diffidently, as one who does not desire to be
boastful.
"That's fine!" she said, and thought that they paid nearly half that
sum for rent, and that the very clothes she was wearing had cost more
than his month's salary. She would have liked him to know these things,
so that he might see how wonderful Bert was, though they did not have
a house, and the cruelty of even thinking this made her hate herself.
"Why, you're doing splendidly," she said. "I'm so glad!"
Paul, though conscientiously modest, agreed with her, and was deeply
pleased by her applause. After an evident struggle between two opposing
impulses, he began to ask questions about her. She found there was very
little to tell him. Yes, she was having a very good time. Yes, she was
very well. His admiration of her rosy color threw her into a strangling
whirlpool of emotions, from which she rescued herself by the sardonic
thought that her technic with rouge had improved since their last
meeting. She told him vaguely that business was fine, and that they had
a lovely apartment on Bush Street.
There was nothing else to tell about herself, and both of them avoided
directly mentioning her husband. She had never more keenly realized the
emptiness of her life, except for Bert, than when she saw Paul's mind
circling about it in an effort to find something there.
He turned at last, baffled, to the book beside her plate.
"Still keeping on reading, I see. I re--" he stopped short. They both
remembered the small book-case with the glass doors that had stood in
his mother's parlor in Masonville, and how they had lingered before
it on the pretext that she was borrowing a book. "Something good?"
he asked hastily. When she showed him the title, he repeated it
doubtfully: "Pragmatism? Well, it's all right, I suppose. I don't go
much for these Oriental notions about religion, myself."
"It isn't a religion, exactly," she said uncertainly. "It's a new way
of looking at things. It's about truth--sort of. I mean, it says there
isn't any, really--not absolutely, you know," she floundered on before
the puzzled question in his eyes. "It says there isn't _absolute_
truth--truth, you know, like a separate thing. Truth's only a sort
of quality, like--well, like beauty, and it belongs to a thing if
the thing works out right. I've got it clear in my head, but I don't
express it very well, I know."
"I don't see any sense to it, myself," he commented. "Truth is just
simply truth, that's all, and it's up to us to tell it all the time."
She knew that an attempt to explain further would fail, and she felt
that her mind had a wider range than his; but she had an impression
of his standing sure-footed and firm on the rock of his simple
convictions, and she saw that his whole life was as secure and stable
as hers was insecure and precarious. She felt about that as she did
about his house, envying him something which she knew was not as
valuable as her own possessions.
A strange pang--a pain she could not understand--struck her when he
stopped at the cashier's grating and paid her check with his own in the
most matter-of-fact way.
They parted at the door of the lunch-room; for seeing his hesitation
she said brightly: "Well, good-by. I'm going the other way." She held
out her hand, and when he took it she added quickly, "I'm so glad to
have seen you looking so well and happy."
"I'm not so blamed happy," he retorted gruffly, as if her words jarred
the exclamation from him. He covered it instantly with a heavy, "So'm
I--I'm glad you are. Good-by."
That exclamation remained in her mind, repeating itself at intervals
like an echo. She had been more deeply stirred than she had realized.
Fragments of old emotions, unrealized hopes, unsatisfied longings, rose
in her, to be replaced by others, to sink, and come back again. "I'm
not so blamed happy." It might have meant anything or nothing. She
wondered what her life would be if she were living in a little house in
Ripley with him, and rejected the picture, and considered it again.
Looking back, she saw all the turnings that had taken her from the
road to a life like that--the road that she had once unquestioningly
supposed that she would take. If she had stayed at home in Masonville,
if she had given up the struggle in Sacramento; if she had been able
to live in San Francisco with nothing to fill her days but work and
loneliness--she saw as a series of merest chances the steps which had
brought her at last to Bert.
One could not have everything. She had him. He was not a man who would
work slowly, day by day, toward a petty job and a small house bought
on the instalment plan. He was brilliant, clever, daring. He would one
day do great things, and she must help him by giving him all her love
and faith and trust. Suddenly it appeared monstrous that she should be
struggling against him, troubling him with her commonplace desires for
a commonplace thing like a home, at the very moment when he needed all
his wit and skill to handle a big deal. She was ashamed of the thoughts
with which she had been playing; they seemed to her an infidelity of
the spirit.