, and had a curious
transparent, waxy appearance, and that the cheeks were a little hollowed,
and the lines from the nose to the corners of the mouth somewhat
deepened, there had been no outward change.... And _this_ once was she! I
thought, Where is she, then? Where is the soul? Where is that which loved
me without understanding me? Where is that which I loved? The baffling,
sad enigma of death confronted me in all its terrifying crudity. The
shaft of love and the desolation of death had struck me almost in the
same hour, and before these twin mysteries, supremely equal, I recoiled
and quailed. I had neither faith nor friend. I was solitary, and my soul
also was solitary. The difficulties of Being seemed insoluble. I was not
a moral coward, I was not prone to facile repentances; but as I gazed at
that calm and unsullied mask I realized, whatever I had gained, how much
I had lost. At twenty-one I knew more of the fountains of life than Aunt
Constance at over sixty. Poor aged thing that had walked among men for
interminable years, and never _known_! It seemed impossible, shockingly
against Nature, that my aunt's existence should have been so! I pitied
her profoundly. I felt that essentially she was girlish compared to me.
And yet--and yet--that which she had kept and which I had given away was
precious, too--indefinably and wonderfully precious! The price of
knowledge and of ecstasy seemed heavy to me then. The girl that had gone
with Diaz into that hotel apartment had come out no more. She had expired
there, and her extinction was the price, Oh, innocence! Oh, divine
ignorance! Oh, refusal! None knows your value save her who has bartered
you! And herein is the woman's tragedy.

There in that mausoleum I decided that I must never see Diaz again. He
was fast in my heart, a flashing, glorious treasure, but I must never see
him again. I must devote myself to memory.

On the dressing-table lay a brown-paper parcel which seemed out of place
there. I opened it, and it contained a magnificently-bound copy of _The
Imitation of Christ_. Upon the flyleaf was written: 'To dearest Carlotta
on attaining her majority. With fondest love. C.P.'

It was too much; it was overwhelming. I wept again. Soul so kind and
pure! The sense of my loss, the sense of the simple, proud rectitude of
her life, laid me low.

V

Train journeys have too often been sorrowful for me, so much so that the
conception itself of a train, crawling ove