ed and restricted. Through all her life this
brave and fine and beautiful being was for the most part of her
possibilities, wasted in a splendid setting, magnificently wasted if you
will, but wasted.

Sec. 2

It was that idea of waste that dominated my mind in a strange interview
I had with Justin. For it became necessary for me to see Justin in order
that we should stamp out the whispers against her that followed her
death. He had made it seem an accidental death due to an overdose of the
narcotic she employed, but he had not been able to obliterate altogether
the beginnings of his divorce proceedings. There had been talk on the
part of clerks and possible witnesses. But of all that I need not tell
you here; what matters is that Justin and I could meet without hatred or
violence. I met a Justin grey-haired and it seemed to me physically
shrunken, more than ever slow-speaking, with his habit of attentive
silences more marked and that dark scar spread beyond his brows.

We had come to our parting, we had done our business with an
affectation of emotional aloofness, and then suddenly he gripped me by
the arm. "Stratton," he said, "we two---- We killed her. We tore her to
pieces between us...."

I made no answer to this outbreak.

"We tore her to pieces," he repeated. "It's so damned silly. One gets
angry--like an animal."

I became grotesquely anxious to assure him that, indeed, she and I had
been, as they say, innocent throughout our last day together. "You were
wrong in all that," I said. "She kept her faith with you. We never
planned to meet and when we met----. If we had been brother and
sister----. Indeed there was nothing."

"I suppose," he said, "I ought to be glad of that. But now it doesn't
seem to matter very much. We killed her.... What does that matter to me
now?"

Sec. 3

And it is upon this effect of sweet and beautiful possibilities, caught
in the net of animal jealousies and thoughtless motives and ancient
rigid institutions, that I would end this writing. In Mary, it seems to
me, I found both womanhood and fellowship, I found what many have dreamt
of, love and friendship freely given, and I could do nothing but clutch
at her to make her my possession. I would not permit her to live except
as a part of my life. I see her now and understand her better than when
she was alive, I recall things that she said and wrote and it is clear
to me, clearer perhaps than it ever was to her, that she, wit