do what he had
trusted her to do.... But it was absurd.

She sat making patterns of little dots with her pencil point upon the
telegram form, and there was a faint smile of amusement upon her lips.

It was absurd--and everything was absurd. What more was to be said or
thought about it? This was the lot of woman. She had made her struggle,
rebelled her little bit of rebellion. Most other women no doubt had done
as much. It made no difference in the long run.

But it was hard to give up the hostels. She had been foolish of course,
but she had not let them make her feel _real_. And she wasn't real. She
was a wife--just _this_....

She sighed and bestirred herself and began to write.

Then abruptly she stopped writing.

For three years her excuse for standing--everything, had been these
hostels. If now the hostels were to be wrenched out of her hands, if at
her husband's death she was to be stripped of every possession and left
a helpless dependant on her own children, if for all her good behaviour
she was to be insulted by his frantic suspicions so long as he lived and
then disgraced by his posthumous mistrust; was there any reason why she
should go on standing anything any more? Away there in England was Mr.
Brumley, _her_ man, ready with service and devotion....

It was a profoundly comforting thing to think of him there as hers. He
was hers. He'd given so much and on the whole so well. If at last she
were to go to him....

Yet when she came to imagine the reality of the step that was in her
mind, it took upon itself a chill and forbidding strangeness. It was
like stepping out of a familiar house into empty space. What could it be
like? To take some odd trunks with her, meet him somewhere, travel,
travel through the evening, travel past nightfall? The bleak strangeness
of that going out never to return!

Her imagination could give her no figure of Mr. Brumley as intimate, as
habitual. She could as easily imagine his skeleton. He remained in all
this queer speculation something friendly, something incidental, more
than a trifle disembodied, entirely devoted of course in that hovering
way--but hovering....

And she wanted to be free. It wasn't Mr. Brumley she wanted; he was but
a means--if indeed he was a means--to an end. The person she wanted, the
person she had always wanted--was _herself_. Could Mr. Brumley give her
that? Would Mr. Brumley give her that? Was it conceivable he would carry
sacrifice to such a