TAL DIFFERENCE

The instinct to conceal certain moods of depression and distress together
with the histrionic power to make the concealment possible may be a
serious peril to a woman of Mary Wollaston's temperament. She had managed
at the telephone that morning to deceive Wallace pretty completely. Even
her laugh had failed to give her away.

She was altogether too near for safety to the point of exhaustion. She
had endured her second night without sleep. She had not really eaten an
adequate meal since her lunch in town the day Paula had engineered her
out of the way for that talk with Maxfield Ware.

There was nothing morbid in her resolution to find, at the earliest
possible moment, some way of making herself independent of her father's
support. Having pointed out Paula's duty as a bread winner she could not
neglect her own, however dreary the method might be, or humble the
results. In any mood, of course, the setting out in search of employment
would have been painful and little short of terrifying to one brought up
the way Mary had been.

A night's sleep though and a proper breakfast would have kept the thing
from being a nightmare. As it was, she felt, setting out with her
clipping from the help-wanted columns of a morning paper, a good deal
like the sole survivor of some shipwreck, washed up upon an unknown
coast, venturing inland to discover whether the inhabitants were
cannibals. Even the constellations in her sky were strange.

Where, then, was Anthony March? Nowhere above her horizon, to-day at all
events. The memory of him had been with her much of the two last
sleepless nights. She had told over the tale of her moments with him
again and again. (Did any one, she might have wondered, ever love as
deeply with so small a treasury of golden hours for memory to draw upon?)
But she could not, somehow, relate him at all to her present or her
future. Her love for him was an out-going rather than an in-coming thing.
At least, her thoughts had put the emphasis upon that side of it; upon
the longing to comfort and protect him, to be the satisfaction to all his
wants. Not--passionately not--to cling heavily about his neck, drag at
his feet, steal his wayfarer's liberty,--no, not the smallest moment of
it! This present helplessness of hers then, which heightened her need for
him, served also to bolt the doors of her thoughts against him.

Her recollection of the next few hours, though it contained some
vignettes