e hour, and
after buying her ticket, assisted her smilingly into the taxicab. While
she sat there, in the middle of the seat, with her little black bag
rocking back and forth as the cab turned the corners, all capacity for
feeling, all possibility of sensation even, seemed to have passed out of
her body. The impulse which was carrying her to Dinwiddie was the
physical impulse which drives a wounded animal back to die in its
shelter. Even the flaring advertisements of Oliver's play, which was
still running in a Broadway theatre, aroused no pain, hardly any thought
of him or of the past, in her mind. She had ceased to suffer, she had
ceased even to think; and when, a little later, she followed the station
porter down the long platform, she was able to brush aside the memory of
her parting from Oliver as lightly as though it were the trivial sting
of a wasp. When she remembered the agony of the last year, of yesterday,
of the morning through which she had just lived, it appeared almost
ridiculous. That death which she had lacked the courage to die seemed
creeping over her soul before it reached the outer shell of her body.

In the train, she was attacked by a sensation of faintness, and
remembering that she had eaten nothing all day, she went into the
dining-car, and sat down at one of the little tables. When her luncheon
was brought, she ate almost ravenously for a minute. Then her sudden
hunger was followed by a disgust for the look of the dishes and the
cinders on the table-cloth, and after paying her bill, for which she
waited an intolerable time, she went back to her chair in the next
coach, and watched, with unseeing eyes, the swiftly moving landscape,
which rushed by in all the brilliant pageantry of October. Several seats
ahead of her, two men were discussing politics, and one of them, who
wore a clerical waistcoat, raised his voice suddenly so high that his
words penetrated the wall of blankness which surrounded her thoughts, "I
tell you it is the greatest menace to our civilization!" and then, as he
controlled his excitement, his speech dropped quickly into
indistinctness.

"How absurd of him to get so angry about it," thought Virginia with
surprise, "as if a civilization could make any difference to anybody on
earth." And she watched the clergyman for a minute, as if fascinated by
the display of his earnestness. "What on earth can it matter to him?"
she wondered mildly, "and yet to look at him one would think t