ady.

A letter from him was always in the first Saturday morning delivery and
she never left for her atelier till she got it. She had perceived, what
he had not, the steadily growing friendliness of these letters. It
wasn't a made-up thing, either. He was not telling her things because he
thought she'd like to be told, but because it had insensibly become a
need of his to tell her.

A year ago those letters would have made her wildly happy; would have
filled her with the confidence that the end she sought was in sight at
last. Now they drove her half mad with disappointment. She never opened
one of those dearly familiar envelopes without the irrepressible hope
that it contained a love-letter; a passionate demand that she come back
to him; leave all she had and come back to him; his woman to her man.
And her disappointment and inconsistency bewildered her.

Her two chance encounters, first with Jimmy Wallace in the theater, and
later with James Randolph, made her restlessness more nearly
unendurable. The thought that they were going back to Chicago and would,
no doubt, within a few days after their talks with her, see and talk
with him, was like the cup of Tantalus. And if she could encounter them
by chance, like that, why mightn't she encounter him? Why mightn't he
come to New York on business? She never walked anywhere, nowadays,
without watching for him.

She didn't yield, passively, to these thoughts and feelings. She fought
them relentlessly, methodically. She went to a women's gymnasium every
evening, threw a medicine ball around for a while, and then played a
hard game of squash, in the sometimes successful attempt to get tired
enough so that she'd have to sleep. Also she tried riding in the park,
mornings, but that didn't work so well, and she gave it up.

There came a Saturday morning, toward the end of May, which brought no
letter from Rodney, and she stayed in all day, from one delivery to the
next, waiting for it. She tried to disguise her excitement over its
failure to arrive, as a fear lest something might have gone wrong with
him or with the twins, but did not succeed. If anything had gone wrong
she knew she'd have heard. The thing that kept clutching at her heart
was hope. The hope that the letter wouldn't come at all; that there'd be
a telephone call instead--and Rodney's voice.

The telephone did ring just before noon, but the voice was Galbraith's.
He wanted to know if she wouldn't come over to h