t that
into my letter to him. I'll say that I will ask, as a last favor, that
he will not let her call him 'Maurice.'"

For by this time she had added another straw to the pile of rubbish in
her mind: _she would write him a letter_. In it she would tell him that
she was going to ... die, so that he could marry Lily and have Jacky!
Then came the mental postscript, which would not, of course, be written;
she would make it possible for him to marry Lily--_and impossible for
him to marry Edith_! And by and by she got so close to her mean and
noble purpose--a gift in one dead hand and a sword in the other!--that
she began to think of ways and means. How could she die? She couldn't
buy morphine without a prescription, and she couldn't possibly get a
prescription. But there were other things that people did,--dreadful
things! She knew she couldn't do anything "dreadful." Maurice had a
revolver in his bureau drawer, upstairs--but she didn't know how to
make it "go off"; and if she had known, she couldn't do it; it would
be "dreadful." Well; a rope? No! Horrible! She had once seen a
picture ... she shuddered at the memory of that picture. _That_ was
impossible! Sometimes any way--every way!--seemed impossible. Once,
wandering aimlessly about the thawing back yard, she stood for a long
time at the iron gate, staring at the glimmer, a block away, of the
river--"our river," Maurice used to call it. But in town, "their"
river--flowing!--flowing! was filmed with oil, and washed against slimy
piles, and carried a hideous flotsam of human rubbish; once down below
the bridge she had seen a drowned cat slopping back and forth among
orange skins and straw bottle covers. The river, in town, was as
"dreadful" as those other impossible things! Back in the meadows it was
different--brown and clear where it rippled over shallows and lisped
around that strip of clean sand, and darkly smooth out in the deep
current;--the deep current? Why! _that_ was possible! Of course there
were "things" in the water that she might step on--slimy, creeping
things!--which she was so afraid of. She remembered how afraid she had
been that night on the mountain, of snakes. But the water was clean.

She must have stood there a long time; the maids, in the basement
laundry, said afterward that they saw her, her white hands clutching the
rusty bars of the gate, looking down toward the river, for nearly an
hour. Then Bingo whined, and she went into the house to comfo