When Janet returned home she ran to her bedroom, and taking from the wardrobe the tissue paper that had come with her new dress, and which she had carefully folded, she wrapped the rose in it, and put it away in the back of a drawer.  Thus smothered, its fragrance stifled, it seemed emblematic, somehow, of the clandestine nature of her love....

The weeks that immediately followed were strange ones.  All the elements of life that previously had been realities, trivial yet fundamental, her work, her home, her intercourse with the family, became fantastic.  There was the mill to which she went every day:  she recognized it, yet it was not the same mill, nor was Fillmore Street the Fillmore Street of old.  Nor did the new and feverish existence over whose borderland she had been transported seem real, save in certain hours she spent in Ditmar’s company, when he made her forget—­hers being a temperament to feel the weight of an unnatural secrecy.  She was aware, for instance, that her mother and even her father thought her conduct odd, were anxious as to her absences on certain nights and on Sundays.  She offered no explanation.  It was impossible.  She understood that the reason why they refrained from questioning her was due to a faith in her integrity as well as to a respect for her as a breadwinner who lead earned a right to independence.  And while her suspicion of Hannah’s anxiety troubled her, on the occasions when she thought of it, Lise’s attitude disturbed her even more.  From Lise she had been prepared for suspicion, arraignment, ridicule.  What a vindication if it were disclosed that she, Janet, had a lover—­and that lover Ditmar!  But Lise said nothing.  She was remote, self-absorbed.  Hannah spoke about it on the evenings Janet stayed at home.

She would not consent to meet Ditmar every evening.  Yet, as the days succeeded one another, Janet was often astonished by the fact that their love remained apparently unsuspected by Mr. Price and Caldwell and others in the office.  They must have noticed, on some occasions, the manner in which Ditmar looked at her; and in business hours she had continually to caution him, to keep him in check.  Again, on the evening excursions to which she consented, though they were careful to meet in unfrequented spots, someone might easily have recognized him; and she did not like to ponder over the number of young women in the other offices who knew her by sight.  These reflections weighed upon her, particularly when she seemed conscious of curious glances.  But what caused her the most concern was the constantly recurring pressure to which Ditmar himself subjected her, and which, as time went on, she found increasingly difficult to resist.  He tried to take her by storm, and when this method failed, resorted to pleadings and supplications even harder to deny because of the innate feminine pity she felt for him.  To recount these affairs would be a mere repetition of identical occurrences.