could
not seek anywhere. She wrote to Ludlow and thanked him, and told him
that she did not think she should go on with the picture of Charmian,
for the present. She said, in the first five or six drafts of her
letter, that it had been her uncertainty as to this which made her
hesitate when he spoke to her, but in every form she gave this she
found it false; and at last she left it out altogether, and merely
assured him that she had nothing whatever to forgive him. She wished to
forbid his coming to see her; she did not know quite how to do that;
but either the tone of her letter was forbidding enough, or else he
felt that he had done his whole duty, now, for he did not come.

With moments of utter self-abasement, she had to leave Charmian to the
belief that she was distraught and captious, solely for the reason they
shared the secret of, and Charmian respected this with a devotion so
obvious as to be almost spectacular. Cornelia found herself turning
into a romantic heroine, and had to make such struggle against the
transformation as she could in bursts of hysterical gayety. These had
rather the effect of deepening Charmian's compassionate gloom, till she
exhausted her possibilities in that direction and began to crave some
new expression. There was no change in her affection for Cornelia; and
there were times when Cornelia longed to trust her fully; she knew that
it would be safe, and she did not believe that it would lower her in
Charmian's eyes; but to keep the fact of her weakness altogether her
own seemed the only terms on which she could bear it.

One day there came a letter from her mother out of her usual order of
writing; she wrote on Sunday, and her letters reached Cornelia the next
evening; but this letter came on a Wednesday morning, and the sight of
it filled Cornelia with alarm, first for her mother, and then for
herself; which deepened as she read:

"DEAR NIE: That good-for-nothing little scrub has been here, talken
aboute you, and acting as if you was hand-and-glove with him. Now
Nelie, I don't want to interfere with you anyway and I won't if you
say the word. But I never felt just righte about that fellow, and
what I done long ago to make you tollerate him, and now I want to
make it up to you if I can. He is a common low-down person, and he
isn't fit to speake to you, and I hope you wont speake to him. The
divorce, the way I look at it, don't make any difference; hese