“Serious problems!” She understood.  He was paving the way for renouncing her.  Perhaps it was a money matter—­he thought he ought not marry on a reduced income.  Or perhaps he found he didn’t love her.  For hours she sat there with the letter crumpled in her hand, frozen, inert, until she was incapable of feeling or thinking.  So he was coming at seven.  He took it for granted that she would be ready to see him—­would be eager to walk in the Park with him.  Well, what if she didn’t go?  A fine letter that, after that half-hour at the riverside.  A love-letter!  She laughed bitterly.  And then her heart seemed to break within her.  Life was too hard.  Why had she ever left the peace and quiet of Fall River?  Why had she come down to the cruel, careless, vicious city to be ground up in a wholesale school system and then to break her heart for an uncouth, half-educated printer?  It was all too hard, too cruel.  Why had she been born to suffer so?  Why must she tingle now with pain, when in a few years she would be unfeeling dust again?  Among all the millions of the people of the earth, among all the life of earth and the circling million scattered worlds, she felt utterly isolated, defrauded, betrayed.  Life was a terrible gift, and she did not want it.  This whirl of emotion rose and rose in her, went insanely through her brain, and, becoming intolerable, suddenly ceased and left her careless, numb, and hard.

She arose mechanically and looked in the glass at herself.  Her face was haggard.

“I’m getting homely,” she thought, and quietly went to bed.

But in the night she awoke to a swift frenzy of joy.  He was coming.  After all, he was coming.  She would see him.  She would be near him again.  Yes, how she loved him! loved with all her nature.  It was the intensity of her love that made her hate.  And she lay throbbing with joy, her whole being quivering with desire for him.  He was hers, after all.  It was the woman’s part to forgive and forget.

But when the morning broke, and she arose in her nightgown and sat on the chair at the window, smoothing out and rereading the letter, her doubts returned.  He was coming to renounce her.  He would make all sorts of plausible excuses, he would be remorseful and penitent, but it all came to the same end.  Why should she go and meet him to be humiliated in this way?  She would not go.

Yet she rose and dressed with unusual care and tried to smile back the radiance of her face, and fixed her hair this way and that in a pitiful attempt to take away the sharpness of her expression, and when her little clock showed seven she put on hat and coat with trembling hands and went swiftly down and out at the front door.  She was shaking with terrible emotions, fire filled and raged in her breast, and she had to bite her lip to keep it still.