n aloud: "A Treadwell will always get the thing he wants most in
the end." But while he stabbed her, he would look away in order that he
might be spared the memory of her face.

Without a word, she followed her bags from the room without a word she
entered the elevator, which was waiting, and without a word she took her
place in the taxicab standing beside the curbstone. There was no
rebellion in her thoughts, merely a dulled consciousness of pain, like
the consciousness of one who is partially under an anaesthetic. The
fighting courage, the violence of revolt, had no part in her soul, which
had been taught to suffer and to renounce with dignity, not with
heroics. Her submission was the submission of a flower that bends to a
storm.

As she sat there in silence, with her eyes on the brilliant street,
where the signs of his play stared back at her under the flaring lights,
she began to think with automatic precision, as though her brain were
moved by some mechanical power over which she had no control. Little
things crowded into her mind--the face of the doll she had bought for
Lucy's stepchild that morning, the words on one of the electric signs on
the top of a building they were passing, the leopard skin coat worn by a
woman on the pavement. And these little things seemed to her at the
moment to be more real, more vital, than her broken heart and the
knowledge that she was parting from Oliver. The agony of the night and
the morning appeared to have passed away like a physical pang, leaving
only this deadness of sensation and the strange, almost unearthly
clearness of external objects. "It is not new. It has been coming on for
years," she thought. "He said that, and it is true. It is so old that it
has been here forever, and I seem to have been suffering it all my
life--since the day I was born, and before the day I was born. It seems
older than I am. Oliver is going from me. He has always been going from
me--always since the beginning," she repeated slowly, as if she were
trying to learn a lesson by heart. But so remote and shadowy did the
words appear, that she found herself thinking the next instant, "I must
have forgotten my smelling-salts. The bottle was lying on the bureau,
and I can't remember putting it into my bag." The image of this little
glass bottle, with the gold top, which she had left behind was distinct
in her memory; but when she tried to think of the parting from Oliver
and of all that she was sufferi