had told him she was. Not
that she would have accepted any such offer. Still, she would have
liked to have heard the kindly words. She sat watching his handsome,
graceful figure, draped in the most artistically cut of long dark
overcoats, until he disappeared in the crowd in the Rue de Castiglione.
Then, without a glance up at the interested, not to say excited windows
of the general's splendid and spreading apartments, she strolled down
the gardens toward the Place Concorde. In Paris the beautiful, on a
bright and brisk day it is all but impossible to despair when one still
has left youth and health. Mildred was not happy--far from it. The
future, the immediate future, pressed its terrors upon her. But in
mitigation there was, perhaps born of youth and inexperience, a giddy
sense of relief. She had not realized how abhorrent the general
was--married life with the general. She had been resigning herself to
it, accepting it as the only thing possible, keeping it heavily draped
with her vanities of wealth and luxury--until she discovered that the
wealth and the luxury were in reality no more hers than they were her
maid's. And now she was free!

That word free did not have its full meaning for her. She had never
known what real freedom was; women of the comfortable class--and men,
too, for that matter--usually are born into the petty slavery of
conventions at least, and know nothing else their whole lives
through--never know the joy of the thought and the act of a free mind
and a free heart. Still, she was released from a bondage that seemed
slavish even to her, and the release gave her a sensation akin to the
joy of freedom. A heavy hand that was crushing her very soul had been
lifted off--no, FLUNG off, and by herself. That thought, terrifying
though it was, also gave her a certain new and exalting self-respect.
After all, she was not a worm. She must have somewhere in her the
germs of something less contemptible than the essential character of so
many of the eminently respectable women she knew. She could picture
them in the situation in which she had found herself. What would they
have done? Why, what every instinct of her education impelled her to
do; what some latent love of freedom, some unsuspected courage of
self-respect had forbidden her to do, had withheld her from doing.

Her thoughts and the gorgeous sunshine and her youth and health put her
in a steadily less cheerless mood as by a roundabout