I had passed through one of those stages of mental and spiritual
depression during which a man does not even ask forgiveness of himself
for any of his acts. If "Miss" Coles had wished me to marry her I
would have done so; but the suggestion was never made by either of us.
We parted, a little gloomily, but not unhappily, and before there was
even a breath of scandal. It was just after she heard that her husband
had secured his decree against her. That hard cold fact, that proof of
things which no woman likes to have proved against her, seemed to sober
her, you may say, and bring her up with a round turn. From now on she
was going to be good, she said. No. I mustn't blame myself for
anything. Everything was her fault. Everything always had been. I
was ashamed too? She was glad of that. We'd always be good friends.
Why, yes! From a friend, yes--if he was really as rich as all that.
It would help her to look around, to get her bearings for the new and
better life. It had been a frightfully expensive winter. It had been
sweet of me to keep her rooms so full of flowers. She loved
flowers. . . . Oh, nobody was hurt much, and nobody but us anyway.
Reform is a great thing. I learned from Harry that the very night I
left Palm Beach she lost all the money I had "conveyed" to her at
gambling, and only the other day she ran off with a man I know very
well indeed--and a married man at that. I hope she won't talk too much
in the first few weeks of her infatuation.
I reached New York feeling like the cad that I suppose I am. But it
was pretty bitter hearing about Lucy, and the baby. At least I had
kept faith longer than she had. I wondered if she once more loved her
husband. Did I hope so? Yes, of course, in the same way that you
express conventional horror when you hear of the latest famine in China.
Well, for better for worse, I was a free man again. Free--if it is
free to be tormented by remorse, to feel cheap, futile, a waster--a
thing of no account to anyone. If this is freedom it isn't good to be
free. No man is happy who comes and goes as he pleases. There must be
responsibilities to shoulder, and ties which bind him. If he lives for
himself alone and for what, in the first glad bursts of unattachment he
imagines to be pleasure, a day will come when the acid of self-contempt
begins to corrode him.
I determined to go to France, via London for I needed clothes, and if I
had a definite place it was to volunteer as a nurse in the American
hospital. So I took out a passport, and engaged my passage.
A few days later, while crossing from Madison Avenue to Fifth, I found
myself suddenly face to face with Hilda. She averted her head and
tried to pass without being recognized, but I called her name, and she
stopped short and turned back.
"It's just to ask how you are getting on, Hilda."
"I've just left Mrs. Fulton," she said; "I'm going home."
"Home?"
"England."
"You don't mean it! But why?"
"Oh," she said, "it's all gotten on my nerves--the war. I want to
help. I've saved enough money to take me over, and to keep me if I
have to look round a bit."
"I'm going over, too," I said.
"To help?"
"Oh, Hilda, I don't know. I _hope_ so."
"Oh, I hope so, too, Mr. Mannering."
"But, Hilda, I want to talk to you. There may not be another chance.
Where are you going _now_?"
"I'm staying with friends till I sail."
"Well, tell them you're going for a motor ride with another friend, and
to dine somewhere along the Sound, will you?"
"Oh, I couldn't, not very well."
"Hilda," I said, "there are so many things I want to know, and only you
can tell me about Stamford--about last winter--is it true that Mrs.
Fulton is going----?"
"Yes, she is."