“I don’t know,” she said raggedly.  “Perhaps ...”  A sob clutched at her throat and she did not try to conclude the sentence.

“As to whether you did right or wrong in leaving him,” he went on, “you’ve got to figure it this way.  It isn’t fair to say, ’Knowing what I know now and being what I am now, but in the situation I was in then, I’d have done differently.’  The thing you’ve got to take into account is, being what you were then, suppose you hadn’t gone?  You thought then that you were just his mistress, not knowing what a real mistress was like; and you thought that by going away you could make yourself his friend.  You thought that was your great chance.  Well, you couldn’t have stayed without feeling that you had thrown away your chance; without knowing that you’d had your big thing to do and had been afraid to do it.  And that knowledge would have gone a long way toward making you the thing you thought you were.

“Well, you did your big thing.  And a person who’s done that has stayed alive anyway; and he knows that when his next big thing comes along he’ll do that too.  I don’t pretend that you’ll always come out right in the end if you do the big thing, but I’m pretty sure of this; that you never come out at all if you refuse it.”

His amazement over what she had done increased as he thought about it and was testified to every now and then by grunts and snorts and little exclamations, but he made no more articulate comment.

There was a seven-thirty train she thought she ought to take back to town and as their walk had led in that direction they finished it at the station, where he waited with her for the train to come in.

“It’s been a good day,” she said.  “I feel as if you’d somehow pulled me through.”

“And I,” he said, “feel like a wind-bag.  I’ve talked and talked; smug comfortable preaching.”

“No, it’s helped,” she insisted.  “Or something has.  Just having you there, perhaps.  I feel better, anyway.”

But after she’d got her last look at him on the platform, when the train had carried her off, an observer, seeing the way the color faded out of her face, and the look in the eyes, which, so wide open and so unseeing, stared straight ahead, would have said that the benefit hadn’t lasted long.  There was about her the look of somber terror, just verging on panic, which you have seen in a child’s face when he has been sent up-stairs to bed alone in the dark.

Fragments of Galbraith’s talk came back to her.  It was by ceasing to be her lover and her partner that he had become her friend.  Rodney, it seemed from his letters, was becoming her friend too.  Was it because he, too, had ceased to be her lover? if ever she stood face to face with him again would she search in vain for that look of hunger—­of ages-old hunger and need—­that she’d last seen when they stood face to face in her little room on Clark Street?

She walked down-town to her apartment from the Pennsylvania station end, though the natural effect of fatigue was to quicken her pace, and though she was indubitably tired, she walked slowly; slowly, and still more slowly.  She found she dreaded going back to that apartment of hers and shutting herself in for the night, alone.