f its linen and left the mattress rolled over the
foot-board in eloquent abandonment. The waste-basket bulged with
discarded odds and ends. One had only to look into that room to feel
convinced that its occupant had disappeared, like a spirit from a dead
body, never to return.

I went to my sister Lucy's. I did not write her. I simply took a morning
train to Boston and called her up on the 'phone in her not far distant
university town. She came trotting cheerfully in to meet me. I told her
my news; she tenderly gathered what was left of me together, and carried
the bits out here to her little white house on the hill.

CHAPTER X

A UNIVERSITY TOWN

I did not think I would be seated here on my rustic bench writing so
soon again. I finished the history of my catastrophe a week ago. But
something almost pleasant has occurred, and I'd like to try my pencil at
recording a pleasant story. Scarcely a story yet, though. Just a bit of
a conversation--that's all--fragmentary. It refers to this very bench
where I am sitting as I write, to the hills I am seeing out beyond the
little maple tree stripped now of all its glory. I cannot see a dash of
color anywhere. The world is brown. The sky is gray. It is rather chilly
for writing out-of-doors.

The conversation I refer to began in an ugly little room in a
professor's house. There was a roll-top desk in the room, and a map,
yellow with age, hanging on the wall. The conversation ended underneath
a lamp-post on a street curbing, and it was rainy and dark and cold. And
yet when I think of that conversation, sitting here in the brown chill
dusk, I see color, I feel warmth.

When I first came here to Lucy's three weeks ago, she assumed that I
was suffering from a broken heart. I had been exposed and showed
symptoms--going off alone for long walks and consuming reams of theme
paper as if I was half mad. I told Lucy that my heart was too hard to
break, but I couldn't convince her. There wasn't a day passed but that
she planned some form of amusement or diversion. Even Will, her husband,
cooperated and spent long evenings playing rum or three-handed auction,
so I might not sit idle. I tried to fall in with Lucy's plans.

"But, please, no men! I don't want to see another man for years. If any
man I know finds out I'm here, tell him I won't see him, absolutely," I
warned. "I want to be alone. I want to think things out undisturbed.
Sometimes I almost wish I could enter a conven