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 New York boarding-house.  It was summer, and the other boarders were in the country; all the servants except the cook had been dismissed, and she, when not working, slept profoundly on the fifth floor.  The landlady also was out of town on a brief holiday.

The window was open to admit the thick unstirring air; no sound rose from the row of long narrow yards, nor from the tall deep houses annexed.  The latter deadened the rattle of the streets.  At intervals the distant elevated lumbered protestingly along, its grunts and screams muffled by the hot suspended ocean.

She sat there plunged in the profoundest grief that can come to the human soul, for in all other agony hope flickers, however forlornly.  She gazed dully at the unconscious breathing form of the man who had been friend, and companion, and lover, during five years of youth too vigorous and hopeful to be warped by uneven fortune.  It was wasted by disease; the face was shrunken; the night-garment hung loosely about a body which had never been disfigured by flesh, but had been muscular with exercise and full-blooded with health.  She was glad that the body was changed; glad that its beauty, too, had gone some other-where than into the coffin.  She had loved his hands as apart from himself; loved their strong warm magnetism.  They lay limp and yellow on the quilt:  she knew that they were already cold, and that moisture was gathering on them.  For a moment something convulsed within her. They had gone too.  She repeated the words twice, and, after them, “forever.”  And the while the sweetness of their pressure came back to her.