next sentence, she
was aware of a waitress, whose expression intimated that it was closing
time, and, looking round, Katharine saw herself almost the last person
left in the shop. She took up her letter, paid her bill, and found
herself once more in the street. She would now take a cab to Highgate.
But at that moment it flashed upon her that she could not remember the
address. This check seemed to let fall a barrier across a very powerful
current of desire. She ransacked her memory in desperation, hunting
for the name, first by remembering the look of the house, and then by
trying, in memory, to retrace the words she had written once, at least,
upon an envelope. The more she pressed the farther the words receded.
Was the house an Orchard Something, on the street a Hill? She gave
it up. Never, since she was a child, had she felt anything like this
blankness and desolation. There rushed in upon her, as if she were
waking from some dream, all the consequences of her inexplicable
indolence. She figured Ralph's face as he turned from her door without
a word of explanation, receiving his dismissal as a blow from herself,
a callous intimation that she did not wish to see him. She followed his
departure from her door; but it was far more easy to see him marching
far and fast in any direction for any length of time than to conceive
that he would turn back to Highgate. Perhaps he would try once more to
see her in Cheyne Walk? It was proof of the clearness with which she saw
him, that she started forward as this possibility occurred to her, and
almost raised her hand to beckon to a cab. No; he was too proud to come
again; he rejected the desire and walked on and on, on and on--If
only she could read the names of those visionary streets down which he
passed! But her imagination betrayed her at this point, or mocked her
with a sense of their strangeness, darkness, and distance. Indeed,
instead of helping herself to any decision, she only filled her mind
with the vast extent of London and the impossibility of finding any
single figure that wandered off this way and that way, turned to the
right and to the left, chose that dingy little back street where
the children were playing in the road, and so--She roused herself
impatiently. She walked rapidly along Holborn. Soon she turned and
walked as rapidly in the other direction. This indecision was not merely
odious, but had something that alarmed her about it, as she had been
alarmed slig