eful, she
could say to herself, "Well, I can always marry Bobby and go to live in
Italy."

He put it to her.

"Lydia, wouldn't you consider marrying me to-morrow and sailing for
Greece or Sicily or Grenada--that's a heavenly place. I should be so
wildly happy, dear, that I think you'd be pleased in a mild sort of
way, too."

Go away? It was the last thing she wanted to do.

"No, no!" she said quickly. "I must stay here!"

"Well, marry me and stay here."

She shook her head, trying to explain to him--she wouldn't ever marry.
She had found a new clew to life and wanted to follow it alone. She had
interest, intense, vital interest, to give to life and affairs--yes, and
even people; but she had not love. Human relationships couldn't make or
mar life for her any more. She wanted to work--nothing else.

She paused, and in the pause the dining-room door opened and Eleanor
came in. Eleanor had been up at dawn to get a train from the Adirondacks
in time to meet Lydia at the station, and of course the train had been
late. Would Lydia put her up for the night?

Lydia's cry of welcome did not sound like a person to whom all human
relationships had become indifferent. Indeed Eleanor was the person she
wanted most to see. Eleanor was not emotional, or rather she expressed
her emotion by a heightened intellectual sensitiveness. She wouldn't
cry, she wouldn't regard Lydia as a shorn lamb the way Miss Bennett did,
nor yet would she assume that she was utterly unchanged, as all the rest
of her friends might. Eleanor's manner was almost commonplace. Perhaps
it would be fairer to say that she left the introduction of anything
dramatic to Lydia's choice.

Bobby soon went away and left the two women together. They went upstairs
to Lydia's bedroom, and in their dressing gowns, with chairs drawn to
the fire, they talked. They talked with long pauses between them. No one
but Eleanor would have allowed those long silences to pass
uninterrupted, but she was wise enough to know they were the very
essence of companionship.

Though Eleanor asked several questions about the details of prison life,
she was too wise to ask anything about the fundamental change which she
felt had taken place in Lydia. She did not betray that she felt there
was a change. She wondered whether Lydia knew it herself. It was hard to
say, for the girl, always inexpert with verbal expressions, had become
more so in the two years of solitude and contemplation. What