will. An instinct stronger
than reason was guiding her steps.

In Fifth Avenue the crowd was already beginning to stream by on the
sidewalks, and as she mingled with it, she recalled that other morning
when she had moved among these people and had felt that they looked at
her kindly because she was beautiful and young. Now the kindness had
given way to indifference in their eyes. They no longer looked at her;
and when a shop window, which she was passing, showed her a reflection
of herself, she saw only a commonplace middle-aged figure, with a look
of withered sweetness in the face, which had grown suddenly wan. And
the sight of this figure fell like a weight on her heart, destroying the
last vestige of courage.

Before the door of the hotel in which Oliver was staying, she stood so
long, with her vacant gaze fixed on the green velvet carpet within the
hall, that an attendant in livery came up at last and inquired if she
wished to see any one. Arousing herself with a start, she shook her head
hurriedly and turned back into the street, for when the crucial moment
came her decision failed her. Just as she had been unable to make a
scene on the night when they had parted, so now it was impossible for
her to descend to the vulgarity of thrusting her presence into his life.
Unless the frenzy of delirium seized her again, she knew that she should
never have the strength to put the desperation of thought into the
desperation of action. What she longed for was not to fight, not to
struggle, but to fall, like a wounded bird, to the earth, and be
forgotten.

At the crossing, where there was a crush of motor cars and carriages,
she stopped for a moment and thought how easy it would be to die in the
crowded street before returning to Dinwiddie. "All I need do is to slip
and fall there, and in a second it would be over." But so many cars went
by that she knew she should never be able to do it, that much as she
hated life, something bound her to it which she lacked the courage to
break. There shot through her mind the memory of a soldier her father
used to tell about, who was always first on the field of battle, but had
never found the courage to charge. "He was like me--for I might stand
here forever and yet not find the courage to die."

A beggar came up to her and she thought, "He is begging of me, and yet I
am more miserable than he is." Then, while she searched in her bag for
some change, it seemed to her that the faces gli