“I must go now,” she said.  “Good-by.  Keep them carefully for me.”  Her voice was steady, and though her eyes were bright, there was no trace of tears upon her cheeks.  But there was a kind of glory shining in her face that was too much for Doris, who turned away and sobbed loudly.  Even Mrs. Ruston’s eyes were wet.

“Good-by,” said Rose again, and went down composedly enough to her car.

She rode down to the station, shook hands with and said good-by to Otto, the chauffeur, allowed the porter to carry her bag into the waiting-room.  There she tipped the porter, picked up the bag herself, and walked out the other door; crossed over to Clark Street and took a street-car.  At Chicago Avenue she got off and walked north, keeping her eye open for placards advertising rooms to let.  It was at the end of about a half mile that she found the hatchet-faced landlady, paid her three dollars, and locked her door, as a symbol, perhaps, of the bigger heavier door that she had swung to and locked on the whole of her past life.

Amid all the welter of emotions boiling up within her, grief was not present.  There was a very deep-reaching excitement that sharpened all her faculties; that even made her see colors more brightly and hear fainter sounds.  There was an intent eagerness to get the new life fairly begun.  But, strangest of all, and yet so vivid that even its strangeness couldn’t prevent her being aware of it, was a perfectly enormous relief.  The thing which, when she had first faced it as the only thoroughfare to the real life she so passionately wanted, had seemed such a veritable nightmare, was an accomplished fact.  The week of acute agony she had lived through while she was forcing her sudden resolution on Rodney had been all but unendurable with the enforced contemplation of the moment of parting which it brought so relentlessly nearer.  There had been a terror, too, lest when the moment actually came, she couldn’t do it.  Well, and now it had come and gone!  The surgery of the thing was over.  The nerves and sinews were cut.  The thing was done.  The girl who stood there now in her three-dollar room was free; had won a fresh blank page to write the characters of her life upon.

She felt a little guilty about this.  What heartless sort of a monster must she be to feel—­why, actually happy, at a moment like this?  She ought to be prone on the bed, her face buried in the musty pillow, sobbing her heart out.

But presently, standing there, looking down on the lumpy bed, she smiled widely instead, over the notion of doing it as a sort of concession to respectability.  She had got her absolution from Rodney himself out of the memory of their first real talk together.  Discipline, he’d said, was accepting the facts of life as they were.  Not raising a lamentation because they weren’t different.  The only way you had of getting anywhere was by riding on the backs of your own passions.  Well, her great ride was just beginning!