He yielded, still with his reflective but incurious manner; and when she left the shop a quarter of an hour later the check was in her little bag beside the amethyst necklace.  “I am glad I didn’t have to sell the necklace,” she thought.  “Now I’ll find a hotel and write to mother, and it will all be settled.  It will all be settled,” she repeated in a joyous tone; and this joyousness, overflowing her breast, showed in her eyes, in the little quivering smile on her lips, and in her light and buoyant step over the snow.  A weight had been lifted from her heart, and she felt at peace with the world, at peace with the shivering passers-by, at peace even with George.  The wind, hastening her walk, stung her face till it flushed through its pallor, and sent the warm blood bounding with happiness through her veins.  Under the stainless blue of the sky, it seemed to her that the winter’s earth was suddenly quickening with the seeds of the spring.

In the Waldorf she found a corner which was deserted, except for an elderly man with a dried face and a girl in a green hat, who appeared to be writing to her lover; and sitting down at a little desk behind a lamp, she wrote to her mother without mentioning George, without explaining anything, without even making excuses for her failure to keep her promise.  She knew now that George had never meant that her mother should live with them, that he had never meant that they should take an apartment, that he had lied to her, without compunction, from the beginning.  She knew this as surely as she knew that he was faithless and selfish, as surely as she knew that he had ceased to love her and would never love her again.  And this knowledge, which had once caused her such poignant agony, seemed now as detached and remote as any tragedy in ancient history.  She was barely twenty-two, and her love story had already dwindled to an impersonal biographical interest in her mind.

When she had finished her letter, she placed the check inside of it, and then sat for a minute pensively watching the girl in the green hat, whose face paled and reddened while she wrote to her lover.

“It seems a hundred years ago since I felt like that,” she thought, “and now it is all over.”  Then because melancholy had no part in her nature, and she was too practical to waste time in useless regrets, she rose quickly from the desk, and went out, while the exhilaration of her mood was still proof against the dangerous weakness of self-pity.  “It’s life I’m living, not a fairy tale,” she told herself sternly as she posted the letter and left the hotel.  “It’s life I’m living, and life is hard, however you take it.”  For a few blocks she walked on briskly, thinking of the shop windows and of the brightness and gaiety of the crowd in Fifth Avenue; but in spite of her efforts, her thoughts fluttered back presently to herself and her own problems.  “After all, you can’t become a victim unless you give in,” she said grimly; “and I’ll die rather than become a victim.”