was too
hard. Why had she ever left the peace and quiet of Fall River? Why had
she come down to the cruel, careless, vicious city to be ground up in a
wholesale school system and then to break her heart for an uncouth,
half-educated printer? It was all too hard, too cruel. Why had she been
born to suffer so? Why must she tingle now with pain, when in a few
years she would be unfeeling dust again? Among all the millions of the
people of the earth, among all the life of earth and the circling
million scattered worlds, she felt utterly isolated, defrauded,
betrayed. Life was a terrible gift, and she did not want it. This whirl
of emotion rose and rose in her, went insanely through her brain, and,
becoming intolerable, suddenly ceased and left her careless, numb, and
hard.

She arose mechanically and looked in the glass at herself. Her face was
haggard.

"I'm getting homely," she thought, and quietly went to bed.

But in the night she awoke to a swift frenzy of joy. He was coming.
After all, he was coming. She would see him. She would be near him
again. Yes, how she loved him! loved with all her nature. It was the
intensity of her love that made her hate. And she lay throbbing with
joy, her whole being quivering with desire for him. He was hers, after
all. It was the woman's part to forgive and forget.

But when the morning broke, and she arose in her nightgown and sat on
the chair at the window, smoothing out and rereading the letter, her
doubts returned. He was coming to renounce her. He would make all sorts
of plausible excuses, he would be remorseful and penitent, but it all
came to the same end. Why should she go and meet him to be humiliated in
this way? She would not go.

Yet she rose and dressed with unusual care and tried to smile back the
radiance of her face, and fixed her hair this way and that in a pitiful
attempt to take away the sharpness of her expression, and when her
little clock showed seven she put on hat and coat with trembling hands
and went swiftly down and out at the front door. She was shaking with
terrible emotions, fire filled and raged in her breast, and she had to
bite her lip to keep it still.

The city flashed before her in all the sparkle of October, the air
tingled, and in the early morning light the houses, the street, looked
as bright and fresh as young school-children washed, combed,
bright-eyed, new with sleep, and up from roofs went magic veilings of
flimsy smoke. Down the aven