She said good-bye with feigned indifference.  What matter could it make?  Still, the coach seemed lorn.

When she went into her own flat she had this to think about.  She did not know whether she would ever see this man any more.  What difference could it make—­what difference could it make?

Hurstwood had returned, and was already in bed.  His clothes were scattered loosely about.  Carrie came to the door and saw him, then retreated.  She did not want to go in yet a while.  She wanted to think.  It was disagreeable to her.

Back in the dining-room she sat in her chair and rocked.  Her little hands were folded tightly as she thought.  Through a fog of longing and conflicting desires she was beginning to see.  Oh, ye legions of hope and pity—­of sorrow and pain!  She was rocking, and beginning to see.

Chapter XXXIII WITHOUT THE WALLED CITY—­THE SLOPE OF THE YEARS

The immediate result of this was nothing.  Results from such things are usually long in growing.  Morning brings a change of feeling.  The existent condition invariably pleads for itself.  It is only at odd moments that we get glimpses of the misery of things.  The heart understands when it is confronted with contrasts.  Take them away and the ache subsides.

Carrie went on, leading much this same life for six months thereafter or more.  She did not see Ames any more.  He called once upon the Vances, but she only heard about it through the young wife.  Then he went West, and there was a gradual subsidence of whatever personal attraction had existed.  The mental effect of the thing had not gone, however, and never would entirely.  She had an ideal to contrast men by—­particularly men close to her.

During all this time—­a period rapidly approaching three years-Hurstwood had been moving along in an even path.  There was no apparent slope downward, and distinctly none upward, so far as the casual observer might have seen.  But psychologically there was a change, which was marked enough to suggest the future very distinctly indeed.  This was in the mere matter of the halt his career had received when he departed from Chicago.  A man’s fortune or material progress is very much the same as his bodily growth.  Either he is growing stronger, healthier, wiser, as the youth approaching manhood, or he is growing weaker, older, less incisive mentally, as the man approaching old age.  There are no other states.  Frequently there is a period between the cessation of youthful accretion and the setting in, in the case of the middle-aged man, of the tendency toward decay when the two processes are almost perfectly balanced and there is little doing in either direction.  Given time enough, however, the balance becomes a sagging to the grave side.  Slowly at first, then with a modest momentum, and at last the graveward process is in the full swing.  So it is frequently