with a scowl at Constance.
But Fitzalan, whose arm Susan had seen Rod press, remained silent.

"Come on, my dear," cried Miss Francklyn, smiling sweet
insolent treachery into Susan's face.

Susan smiled sweetly back at her. As she was leaving the
taxicab in Forty-fifth Street, she said:

"Send Rod home by noon, won't you? And don't tell him I know."

Miss Francklyn, who had been drinking greedily, began to cry.
Susan laughed. "Don't be a silly," she urged. "If I'm not
upset, why should you be? And how could I blame you two for
getting crazy about each other? I wouldn't spoil it for
worlds. I want to help it on."

"Don't you love him--really?" cried Constance, face and voice
full of the most thrilling theatricalism.

"I'm very fond of him," replied Susan. "We're old, old
friends. But as to love--I'm where you'll be a few months
from now."

Miss Francklyn dried her eyes. "Isn't it the devil!" she
exclaimed. "Why _can't_ it last?"

"Why, indeed," said Susan. "Good night--and don't forget to
send him by twelve o'clock." And she hurried up the steps
without waiting for a reply.

She felt that the time for action had again come--that critical
moment which she had so often in the past seen come and had
let pass unheeded. He was in love with another woman; he was
prosperous, assured of a good income for a long time, though
he wrote no more successes. No need to consider him. For
herself, then--what? Clearly, there could be no future for
her with Rod. Clearly, she must go.

Must go--must take the only road that offered. Up before
her--as in every mood of deep depression--rose the vision of
the old women of the slums--the solitary, bent, broken forms,
clad in rags, feet wrapped in rags--shuffling along in the
gutters, peering and poking among filth, among garbage, to get
together stuff to sell for the price of a drink. The old
women of the tenements, the old women of the gutters, the old
women drunk and dancing as the lecherous-eyed hunchback played
the piano.

She must not this time wait and hesitate and hope; this time
she must take the road that offered--and since it must be
taken she must advance along it as if of all possible roads it
was the only one she would have freely chosen.

Yet after she had written and sent off the note to Palmer, a
deep sadness enveloped her--a grief, not for Rod, but for the
association, the intimacy, their life together, its sorrows
and storms perhaps more