s a thawing, an outlet.

She thought of her last talk with Deane, of their walk together that
day, almost a year before, when he came to see her at Annie's, the very
day she was starting back West. She had felt anything but locked in that
day. There was that triumphant sense of openness to life, the joy of new
interest in it, of zest for it. And then she came back West, to Stuart,
and somehow the radiance went, courage ebbed, it came to seem that life
was all fixed, almost as if life, in the real sense, was over. That
sense of having failed, having been inadequate to her own feeling,
struck her down to a wretched powerlessness. And so routine, hard work,
bitter cold, loneliness, that sense of the cruelty of life which the
sternness of the country gave--those things had been able to take her;
it was because something had gone dead in her.

She thought of that spiritual hinterland Deane talked about. She thought
of her and Stuart. She grew very sad in the thinking. She wondered if it
was her fault. However it was, it was true they no longer found the live
things in one another. She had not been able to communicate to him the
feeling with which she came back from Annie's. It was a lesser thing for
trying to talk of it to him. She did not reach him; she knew that he
only thought her a little absurd. After that she did not try to talk to
him of what she felt. Life lessened; things were as they were; they too
were as they were. It came to seem just a matter of following out what
had been begun. And then that news of the divorce had come to mock her.

But she must do something for Deane. Deane must not go like that. She
had brought pencil and writing tablet with her, thinking that perhaps
out of doors, away from the house where she had seemed locked in all
winter, she could write to him. She thought of things to say, things
that should be said, but she did not seem to have any power to charge
them with life. How could the dead rouse the dead? She sat there
thinking of her and Deane, of how they had always been able to reach one
another. And finally she began:

"Dear Deane,

"You must find your way back to life."

She did not go on. She sat staring at what she had written. She read it
over; she said it aloud. It surged in upon her, into shut places. She
sat looking at it, frightened at what it was doing. Sat looking at it
after it was all blurred by tears--looking down at the words she herself
had written--"You