“Use mine, dear.”

CHAPTER XXVIII

On the night before they sailed for France, long after she had gone to bed Ethel came out in her wrapper into the warm dark living-room.  There was something she had forgotten to do, and she wanted to get it off her mind.  She switched on the light by the doorway, and looked about her smiling, but with a little shiver, too.

The ghost was gone—­or nearly so.  Already the room had been stripped bare.  Only Ethel’s desk was left, and a chair or two and the long, heavy table with a lamp at either end.  Amy’s picture was still on the table, but it lay now on its back and looked up at the ceiling as though it knew it must soon depart.  Tomorrow the movers would finish their work.  Soon somebody else’s things would be here, and somebody else’s life would pour in and fill the room and make it new.  Somebody else.  What kind of a woman?  Another Amy, or Fanny Carr, or Sally Crothers or Mrs. Grewe?  What a funny, complicated town.  On her return a year from now, Ethel had already decided to take a small house near Washington Square.  How long would that experiment last!  Doubtless in the years ahead she would try other homes, one after the other.  “Why do we move so in New York!” She thought of that plan of her husband’s for the future city street, with long rows on either hand of huge apartment buildings with receding terraces, numberless hanging gardens looking into the street below.  And she wondered whether the city would ever be anything like that?  “In New York all things are possible.” . . .

“However.”  Ethel went to her desk and rummaged for paper, pen and ink.  Then she took out of a cubby-hole a bulky letter and read it through.  It was the “round-robin” come again on its annual journey over the land.  It had been in a lonely mining camp, on a cattle ranch, in a mill town and in cities large and small.  There were many kinds of handwriting here, and widely different stories of the growth, the swift unfolding, of the lives of a new generation of women.  “Girls like me.”  She read it through.

Then she took up her pen and began to write swiftly: 

“I have been here for over three years—­but it was hard to write before, because everything was far from clear.”  She stopped and frowned.  “How much shall I tell them?” An eagerness to be frank and tell all was mingled with that feeling of Anglo-Saxon reticence which had been bred in Ethel’s soul back in the town in Ohio.  “Besides, I haven’t time,” she thought.

“I feel,” she wrote, “as though I were just out of danger—­barely out.  In danger, I mean, of nervously dashing about after nothing until I got wrinkled and old at forty—­nerves in shreds.  I might have done that.  I have met a nerve specialist lately—­and the stories he has told me about women in this town!