It is when a
mate to whom it might wholly have given itself appears, that, in its
isolation and desolation, it clamors for its wedded part."

Her teeth indented the nib of her penholder. "Was ever a woman in such a
predicament before? So illusionary and yet so ridiculously actual! Shall
I send Hedworth away and sit down with this phantom through life? I
understand that some women get their happiness out of just that sort of
thing. Then when I forget Hedworth would I forget _him_? Is passion
needed to set the soul free? Until Hedworth made me feel awakened
womanhood personified, I had not thought of this man for years, not even
during the year of my mourning, when I was rather bored. What am I to
do? I can't fling my life away. I am not a morbid idiot. But I can't
marry one man if what I feel for him is simply the galvanizing of a
corpse. Hedworth ought to be taken ill and his life despaired of. That
is the way things would work out in a novel."

Her face grew whiter still. She had experienced another mental shock.
For the first time she realized that no woman could suffer twice as she
had suffered five years ago. That at least was all the other man's. Her
capacity for pain had been blunted, two-thirds exhausted. If Hedworth
left her, died, she might regret him, long to have him back; but the
ghost of that abandon of grief, that racking of every sense, that
groping in an abyss while a voiceless something within her raved and
shrieked, resolved itself into a finger of fire, which wrote Hedworth's
inferior position.

"What shall I do? What shall I do?" She dipped the pen into the ink and
put it to the paper. At least, for the moment, she could write a
friendly note to this man, convey tactful sympathy, little good as it
would do him. The letter must be answered.

She heard a step on the gravel beneath her open window. She sprang to
her feet, the blood rushing to her hair. She ran to the window and
leaned out, smiling and trembling. Hedworth's eyes flashed upward to
hers. She was, it must be admitted, a product of that undulating and
alluring plain we call "the world," not of those heights where the few
who have scaled them live alone.

VIII

Death and the Woman.

(This story first appeared in _Vanity Fair_, London, in 1892)

Her husband was dying, and she was alone with him. Nothing could exceed
the desolation of her surroundings. She and the man who was going from
her were in the third-floor-back of a N