Ethel began to feel more free, for Joe was no longer on her mind.  More than once, in fact, she was surprised at the way he seemed to be settling down.  She felt a deeper change in him, something she did not understand.  The worn harassed expression she had so often seen on his face while his wife had been alive, the look of a man driven and drained of his vitality, was now gone; and in its place was an unconscious look of content.  He often stayed very late at the office; and more and more in his evenings at home he went to his desk and became absorbed in documents and blue print plans.

“What a refuge a man’s business is,” she thought with a twinge of envy.

And wistfully she began to look about for some resource for herself.  She felt the youth within her rise, but the city seemed so vast and strange.  In her loneliness the big building of which her present home was a part, seemed doubly huge, impersonal, hard; and so did every other building on that block appear.  She felt lost, left out amid ceaseless tides of gaiety on every hand.  She took long determined walks, and on these walks she donned the smart attractive clothes that she had bought with Amy.  She strove to keep her mind on the sights, the faces of people afoot and in cars, the adorable things in shop windows.  And she chatted busily to herself in order to keep on admiring.  This old habit of hers, of soliloquy, had grown upon her unawares, as a refuge from her loneliness.  Sometimes she even talked aloud.  Sturdily she told herself: 

“You’ve only begun.  You’ll get up out of this, Ethel Knight—­just wait.  Can’t you give a few months to Amy now?”

And scowling at her “morbidness” in feeling dreary and forlorn, she resolutely scanned the papers for news of lectures, plays and concerts.  She went to a few in the afternoons, and dressed for them as carefully as though they were great social affairs.  And in the intermissions when a buzz of talk would rise, she would begin with quick animation to converse with herself and be gay, or alert and argumentative.  Her lips would move inaudibly.  Now and then she would brightly smile and nod across the house at some friend she pretended to have seen.  She enrolled for a course of lectures upon “Mental Science.”  She resumed her reading of magazines and books on all kinds of topics.  It made her think of high school days, and hungrily she reached back for that old. zest and inquisitiveness about everything under the moon and stars.

And through this searching she caught hints of the presence in the city of a life wider and deeper than shops and yet not antagonistic—­a life of gaiety, grace and ease, but with it all the brilliancy to which Amy had been blind; the rich ferment of new ideas in women’s lives, discussions, work of many kinds, art, music, “movements” all combined into one thrilling pulsing whole.  And again she felt within herself that rising tide of youth and eager vitality.