one in which he
used to sit, watching the fire at night, before going to bed; the clock
on the mantel was the one he had selected; the rug, which was threadbare
in places, he had helped her to choose; the pile of English reviews on
the table he had subscribed to; the little glass water bottle on the
candle-stand by the bed, she had bought years ago because he liked to
drink in the night. There was nothing in which he did not have a part.
Every trivial incident of her life was bound up with the thought of him.
She could no more escape the torment of these associations than she
could escape the fact of herself. For so long she had been one with him
in her thoughts that their relationship had passed, for her, into that
profound union of habit which is the strongest union of all. Even the
years in which he had grown gradually away from her had appeared to her
to leave untouched the deeper sanctities of their marriage.

A knock came at the door, and the cook, with a list of groceries in her
hand, entered to inquire if her mistress were going to market. With the
beginning of the autumn Virginia had tried to take an interest in her
housekeeping again, and the daily trip to the market had relieved, in a
measure, the terrible vacancy of her mornings. Now it seemed to her that
the remorseless exactions of the material details of living offered the
only escape from the tortures of memory. "Yes, I'll go," she said,
reaching out her hand for the list, and her heart cried, "I cannot live
if I stay in this room any longer. I cannot live if I look at these
things." As she turned away to put on her hat, she was seized by a
superstitious feeling that she might escape her suffering by fleeing
from these inanimate reminders of her marriage. It was as though the
chair and the rug and the clock had become possessed with some
demoniacal spirit. "If I can only get out of doors I shall feel better,"
she insisted; and when she had hurriedly pinned on her hat and tied her
tulle ruff at her throat, she caught up her gloves and ran quickly down
the stairs and out into the street. But as soon as she had reached the
sidewalk, the agony, which she had thought she was leaving behind her in
the closed room upstairs, rushed over her in a wave of realization, and
turning again, she started back into the yard, and stopped, with a
sensation of panic, beside the bed of crimson dahlias at the foot of the
steps. Then, while she hesitated, uncertain whether to