omen. MacHugh and Smite had gone back home for the
summer, and it was a relief from his loneliness to encounter one day in
an editorial office, Norma Whitmore, a dark, keen, temperamental and
moody but brilliant writer and editor who, like others before her, took
a fancy to Eugene. She was introduced to him by Jans Jansen, Art
Director of the paper, and after some light banter she offered to show
him her office.

She led the way to a little room no larger than six by eight where she
had her desk. Eugene noticed that she was lean and sallow, about his own
age or older, and brilliant and vivacious. Her hands took his attention
for they were thin, shapely and artistic. Her eyes burned with a
peculiar lustre and her loose-fitting clothes were draped artistically
about her. A conversation sprang up as to his work, which she knew and
admired, and he was invited to her apartment. He looked at Norma with an
unconsciously speculative eye.

Christina was out of the city, but the memory of her made it impossible
for him to write to Angela in his old vein of devotion. Nevertheless he
still thought of her as charming. He thought that he ought to write more
regularly. He thought that he ought pretty soon to go back and marry
her. He was approaching the point where he could support her in a studio
if they lived economically. But he did not want to exactly.

He had known her now for three years. It was fully a year and a half
since he had seen her last. In the last year his letters had been less
and less about themselves and more and more about everything else. He
was finding the conventional love letters difficult. But he did not
permit himself to realize just what that meant--to take careful stock of
his emotions. That would have compelled him to the painful course of
deciding that he could not marry her, and asking her to be released from
his promise. He did not want to do that. Instead he parleyed, held by
pity for her passing youth and her undeniable affection for him, by his
sense of the unfairness of having taken up so much of her time to the
exclusion of every other person who might have proposed to her, by
sorrow for the cruelty of her position in being left to explain to her
family that she had been jilted. He hated to hurt any person's feelings.
He did not want to be conscious of the grief of any person who had come
to suffering through him and he could not make them suffer very well and
not be conscious. He was too tender