the words she had said to Kemper a little earlier:  “No—­no—­I cant.  It is impossible.”  And she said over these words many times because they infused into her heart the courage of despair which she needed to impel her to the step before her.  When the door closed after her and she went down into the street, she was still speaking them half aloud to herself:  “No—­no—­it is impossible.”

The dusk had already settled; ahead of her the lights of the city shone blurred through the greyness, while above the housetops Auriga was driving higher in the east.  With the first touch of fresh air in her face, she felt herself inspired by an energy; which seemed a part of the wind that blew about her; and as she walked rapidly through streets which she did not notice toward an end of which she was still ignorant, her thoughts breaking from the restraint which held them, rushed in an excited tumult through her brain.

“Why did he look at me so?” she asked, “for it is this look which has driven me away—­which has made me hate both him and myself.”  She tried to recall the other expression which she had loved in his face, but instead there returned to her only the angry look with which he had responded to her confession.

As she thought of it now it appeared to her that death was the only means by which she could free herself and him from this marriage; and the several ways of dying which were possible to her crowded upon her with the force of an outside pressure.  She might be crushed in the street? or walk on till she found the river?  But the different approaches to death showed to her as so hideous that she knew she could not summon the courage with which to select a particular one and follow it to the end.  “Yet I shall never go back,” she thought, “he does not love me—­he wishes only to spare himself the scandal.  If he loved me he could never have looked at me like that.  And I loved him three weeks ago,” she added.  Her love was gone now, and the memory of it had become intolerable to her, yet the vacancy where it had been was so great that death occurred to her again as the only outcome.  “Though I hate him it seems impossible that I should live on without him,” she said.

But the next instant when she endeavored to recall his face she could remember him only by his casual likeness to Perry Bridewell, and she saw him standing upon the hearthrug while he pulled in angry perplexity at his moustache.  The words he had spoken, the tones of his voice, and her own emotion, were blotted from her recollection as if a thick darkness had wiped them out, and from the hour of her deepest anguish she could bring back only a meaningless gesture and the white rosebud he had worn in his coat.  What she had suffered then was the dying agony of the thing within her which was really herself, and there remained to her now only the vacant image from which the passion and the life had flown.  “How could it make so much difference when I can barely remember it?” she asked; and it seemed to her at the instant that nothing that could happen in one’s existence really mattered, since big and little were all equal, and the memory of an emotion faded sooner than the memory of a gesture.