“Oh, conversation!  No, it’s much more than that.  I think it’s a greatness of life—­a refusal to be content with even the healthiest mud.”

“Don’t you know that nobody ever solved a problem by running away from it?”

“Perhaps.  Only I choose to make my own definition of ‘running away’ I don’t call——­Do you realize how big a world there is beyond this Gopher Prairie where you’d keep me all my life?  It may be that some day I’ll come back, but not till I can bring something more than I have now.  And even if I am cowardly and run away—­all right, call it cowardly, call me anything you want to!  I’ve been ruled too long by fear of being called things.  I’m going away to be quiet and think.  I’m—­I’m going!  I have a right to my own life.”

“So have I to mine!”

“Well?”

“I have a right to my life—­and you’re it, you’re my life!  You’ve made yourself so.  I’m damned if I’ll agree to all your freak notions, but I will say I’ve got to depend on you.  Never thought of that complication, did you, in this ’off to Bohemia, and express yourself, and free love, and live your own life’ stuff!”

“You have a right to me if you can keep me.  Can you?”

He moved uneasily.

II

For a month they discussed it.  They hurt each other very much, and sometimes they were close to weeping, and invariably he used banal phrases about her duties and she used phrases quite as banal about freedom, and through it all, her discovery that she really could get away from Main Street was as sweet as the discovery of love.  Kennicott never consented definitely.  At most he agreed to a public theory that she was “going to take a short trip and see what the East was like in wartime.”

She set out for Washington in October—­just before the war ended.

She had determined on Washington because it was less intimidating than the obvious New York, because she hoped to find streets in which Hugh could play, and because in the stress of war-work, with its demand for thousands of temporary clerks, she could be initiated into the world of offices.

Hugh was to go with her, despite the wails and rather extensive comments of Aunt Bessie.

She wondered if she might not encounter Erik in the East but it was a chance thought, soon forgotten.

III

The last thing she saw on the station platform was Kennicott, faithfully waving his hand, his face so full of uncomprehending loneliness that he could not smile but only twitch up his lips.  She waved to him as long as she could, and when he was lost she wanted to leap from the vestibule and run back to him.  She thought of a hundred tendernesses she had neglected.

She had her freedom, and it was empty.  The moment was not the highest of her life, but the lowest and most desolate, which was altogether excellent, for instead of slipping downward she began to climb.