h were possible to her crowded upon her
with the force of an outside pressure. She might be crushed in the
street? or walk on till she found the river? But the different
approaches to death showed to her as so hideous that she knew she could
not summon the courage with which to select a particular one and follow
it to the end. "Yet I shall never go back," she thought, "he does not
love me--he wishes only to spare himself the scandal. If he loved me he
could never have looked at me like that. And I loved him three weeks
ago," she added. Her love was gone now, and the memory of it had become
intolerable to her, yet the vacancy where it had been was so great that
death occurred to her again as the only outcome. "Though I hate him it
seems impossible that I should live on without him," she said.

But the next instant when she endeavored to recall his face she could
remember him only by his casual likeness to Perry Bridewell, and she saw
him standing upon the hearthrug while he pulled in angry perplexity at
his moustache. The words he had spoken, the tones of his voice, and her
own emotion, were blotted from her recollection as if a thick darkness
had wiped them out, and from the hour of her deepest anguish she could
bring back only a meaningless gesture and the white rosebud he had worn
in his coat. What she had suffered then was the dying agony of the thing
within her which was really herself, and there remained to her now only
the vacant image from which the passion and the life had flown. "How
could it make so much difference when I can barely remember it?" she
asked; and it seemed to her at the instant that nothing that could
happen in one's existence really mattered, since big and little were all
equal, and the memory of an emotion faded sooner than the memory of a
gesture.

Pausing for a moment on the corner, she watched curiously the faces
moving under the electric lights, and she found herself wondering
presently if each man or woman in the crowd was loving and hating or
seeking an escape from both love and hatred? A stout man wearing a red
necktie, a pretty woman in a purple coat, a pale girl carrying a heavy
bundle, a bent shouldered clerk who walked with a satisfied and affected
air--as each one passed she saw his features and even his hidden
thoughts in a grotesque clearness which seemed to come partly from an
illumination within herself and partly from the glare of the lights
without. "The man in the red neckt