Dear Lady Carnath—­I have been in Canada all summer.  No letters were forwarded.  I find yours here at the Metropolitan.  Thanks, I am well.  Life is the same with me.  I eat and drink and wither.  But you are a memory to be thankful for, and I have never tried to forget you.  I was glad to learn through Tower, whom I met in Montreal, that you were well and happy.  I wish I may never hear otherwise.

Then followed several pages of news of her old friends.

“Poor fellow!” thought Edith with a sigh.  “But I doubt if any woman or any circumstances would ever make a man like that happy.  There are those wretched people, and I am not half dressed!”

Nevertheless, he again took his stand in her brain and elbowed Hedworth—­whose concrete part was still detained in Switzerland.  She did not answer the letter at once; it was not an easy letter to answer.  But it haunted her; and finally she sat down at her desk and bit the end of her penholder.

She sat staring before her, the man in complete possession.  And gradually the color left her face.  If this old love, which her mind and senses had corporealized, refused to abdicate, had she any right to marry Hedworth?  Now that she had unlocked this ghost, might not she find it at her side whenever her husband was absent, reminding her that she was a sort of mental bigamist?  Carnath had no part in her dilemma; she barely recalled his episode.

She was as positive as she had been when the past unrolled itself that she had no wish to see the first man again; that did he stand before her his power would vanish.  He was a back number—­a fatal position to occupy in the imagination of a vital and world-living woman.

“Is it all that he awakened, made known to me, represented, that arises in resentment?  Or is it that the soul only gives itself once, acknowledges only one mate?  The mind and body, perhaps, obey the demand for companionship again.  The soul in its loneliness endeavors to accompany these comrades, but finds itself linked to the mate of the past.  Probably when a woman marries a man she does not love, the soul, having no demand made upon it, abstracts itself, sleeps.  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.”