ding past her became
suddenly distorted and twisted as though the souls of the women in the
rapidly moving cars were crucified under their splendid furs. "That
woman in the sable cloak is beautiful, and yet she, also, is in
torture," she reflected with an impersonal coldness and detachment. "I
was beautiful, too, but how did it help me?" And she saw herself as she
had been in her girlhood with the glow of happiness, as of one flying,
in her face, and her heart filled with the joyous expectancy of the
miracle which must happen. "I am as old now as Miss Willy was then--and
how I pitied her!" Tears rushed to her eyes, which had been so dry a
minute before, while the memory of that lost gaiety of youth came over
her in a wave that was like the sweetness of the honeysuckle blooming in
the rectory garden.

A policeman, observing that she had waited there so long, held up the
traffic until she had crossed the street, and after thanking him, she
went on again towards the hotel in which she was staying. "He was kind
about helping me over," she said to herself, with an impulse of
gratitude; and this casual kindness seemed to her the one spot of light
in the blackness which surrounded her.

As she approached the hotel, her step flagged, and she felt suddenly
that even that passive courage which was hers--the courage of
endurance--had deserted her. She saw the dreadful hours that must ensue
before she went back to Dinwiddie, the dreadful days that would follow
after she got there, the dreadful weeks that would run on into the
dreadful years. Silent, grey, and endless, they stretched ahead of her,
and through them all she saw herself, a little hopeless figure, moving
towards that death which she had not had the courage to die. The
thoughts of the familiar streets, of the familiar faces, of the house,
of the furniture, of the leaf-strewn yard in which her bed of dahlias
was blooming--all these aroused in her the sense of spiritual nausea
which she had felt when she went back to them after her parting from
Oliver. Nothing remained except the long empty years, for she had
outlived her usefulness.

At the door of the hotel, the hall porter met her with a cheerful face,
and she turned to him with the instinctive reliance on masculine
protection which had driven her to the friendly shelter of the policeman
at the crossing in Fifth Avenue. In reply to her helpless questions, he
looked up the next train to Dinwiddie, which left within th