nce more, she had
"marched up a hill--and--then--marched--down--again"! Her sense of
failure was like a dragging weight under her breastbone! She had not
made Maurice happy; she had not given him children; she had not kept
Edith out of his life. Failure! Failure! "But he loves me; he said so,
when I told him I forgave him about Lily. Of course I oughtn't to have
married him. But I loved him ... so much. And I did want to have just a
little happiness! I never had had any." She sat there, the bellows in
her white, ineffectual hands, looking into the fire; how capable Lily's
hands were! She remembered the sturdy left hand, and that shiny band of
gold ... Then she looked at her own slender wedding ring, and that made
her think of the circle of braided grass; and the locust blossoms; and
the field--and the children who were to come there on the wedding
anniversaries! And now--Maurice's child called another woman
"mother"!... Well, she had tried to bring him back to Maurice; tried,
and failed, with hideous humiliation--for, instead of bringing Jacky
back, this "mother" had brought her back!... "_And she paid my car
fare!_" It was intolerable. "I must send her five cents, somehow!"

She sat on the floor, leaning against Maurice's chair, until midnight;
the log burned through, broke apart, and smoldered into ashes. Once she
put her cheek down on the broad arm of the chair, then kissed it--for
his hand had rested on it!--his dear young hand--In the deepening
chilliness, watching the ashes, she ached with the sense of her last
failure; but most of the time she thought of Edith, and of what she
believed she had read in those humorous, candid eyes. "She dared,
_before me_!--to show him that she was in love with him! He doesn't care
for her--I know that. But I won't have her come here, to my own house,
and make love to him. How can I keep her from coming? Oh, if I could
only get Jacky!"

But she couldn't get him. She had accepted that as final. The talk in
Lily's parlor proved that there was not the slightest hope of getting
Jacky. So the only thing for her to do was to keep Edith out of her
house. When, at nearly one o'clock, shivering, she went up to her room,
she was absorbed in thinking how she could do this. With any other girl
it would have been simple enough; never invite her! But not Edith. Edith
came without an invitation. Edith had, Eleanor thought, "no delicacy."
She had always been that way. She had always lacked ordina