eye open for placards advertising rooms to let. It was at the end of
about a half mile that she found the hatchet-faced landlady, paid her
three dollars, and locked her door, as a symbol, perhaps, of the bigger
heavier door that she had swung to and locked on the whole of her past
life.

Amid all the welter of emotions boiling up within her, grief was not
present. There was a very deep-reaching excitement that sharpened all
her faculties; that even made her see colors more brightly and hear
fainter sounds. There was an intent eagerness to get the new life fairly
begun. But, strangest of all, and yet so vivid that even its strangeness
couldn't prevent her being aware of it, was a perfectly enormous relief.
The thing which, when she had first faced it as the only thoroughfare to
the real life she so passionately wanted, had seemed such a veritable
nightmare, was an accomplished fact. The week of acute agony she had
lived through while she was forcing her sudden resolution on Rodney had
been all but unendurable with the enforced contemplation of the moment
of parting which it brought so relentlessly nearer. There had been a
terror, too, lest when the moment actually came, she couldn't do it.
Well, and now it had come and gone! The surgery of the thing was over.
The nerves and sinews were cut. The thing was done. The girl who stood
there now in her three-dollar room was free; had won a fresh blank page
to write the characters of her life upon.

She felt a little guilty about this. What heartless sort of a monster
must she be to feel--why, actually happy, at a moment like this? She
ought to be prone on the bed, her face buried in the musty pillow,
sobbing her heart out.

But presently, standing there, looking down on the lumpy bed, she smiled
widely instead, over the notion of doing it as a sort of concession to
respectability. She had got her absolution from Rodney himself out of
the memory of their first real talk together. Discipline, he'd said, was
accepting the facts of life as they were. Not raising a lamentation
because they weren't different. The only way you had of getting anywhere
was by riding on the backs of your own passions. Well, her great ride
was just beginning!

Rose dusted the mirror with a towel--a reckless act, as she saw for
herself, when she discovered she was going to have to use that towel for
a week--and took an appraising look at herself. Then she nodded
confidently--there was nothing the mat