I sent down to
ask if she would see me I had invented no alternative, though to do so I
had had all the time that I was dressing. This failure was humiliating,
yet what could the alternative be? Miss Tita sent back word that I
might come; and as I descended the stairs and crossed the sala to her
door--this time she received me in her aunt's forlorn parlor--I hoped
she would not think my errand was to tell her I accepted her hand. She
certainly would have made the day before the reflection that I declined
it.

As soon as I came into the room I saw that she had drawn this inference,
but I also saw something which had not been in my forecast. Poor Miss
Tita's sense of her failure had produced an extraordinary alteration in
her, but I had been too full of my literary concupiscence to think of
that. Now I perceived it; I can scarcely tell how it startled me. She
stood in the middle of the room with a face of mildness bent upon
me, and her look of forgiveness, of absolution, made her angelic. It
beautified her; she was younger; she was not a ridiculous old woman.
This optical trick gave her a sort of phantasmagoric brightness, and
while I was still the victim of it I heard a whisper somewhere in the
depths of my conscience: "Why not, after all--why not?" It seemed to
me I was ready to pay the price. Still more distinctly however than
the whisper I heard Miss Tita's own voice. I was so struck with the
different effect she made upon me that at first I was not clearly aware
of what she was saying; then I perceived she had bade me goodbye--she
said something about hoping I should be very happy.

"Goodbye--goodbye?" I repeated with an inflection interrogative and
probably foolish.

I saw she did not feel the interrogation, she only heard the words; she
had strung herself up to accepting our separation and they fell upon
her ear as a proof. "Are you going today?" she asked. "But it doesn't
matter, for whenever you go I shall not see you again. I don't want to."
And she smiled strangely, with an infinite gentleness. She had never
doubted that I had left her the day before in horror. How could she,
since I had not come back before night to contradict, even as a simple
form, such an idea? And now she had the force of soul--Miss Tita with
force of soul was a new conception--to smile at me in her humiliation.

"What shall you do--where shall you go?" I asked.

"Oh, I don't know. I have done the great thing. I have destroyed the
pa