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“Eddie, you’re the oldest friend I have,” she said, “and you oughtn’t to find it too hard to trust me. If I promise you faithfully on my word of honor to catch that five o’clock train, will you let me alone a few hours this afternoon?”

“Why?”

“Well”–she hesitated and hung her head a little–“I guess everybody has a right to say–good-by.”

“You want to say good-by to that–“

“Yes, yes,” she said hastily; “just a few hours, Eddie, and I promise faithfully that I’ll be on that train.”

“Well, I suppose no great harm could be done in two hours. If you really want to say good-by–“

I looked up suddenly, and surprised a look of such tense cunning in her face that I winced before it. Her lip was curled up and her eyes were slits again; there wasn’t the faintest touch of fairness and sincerity in her whole face.

We argued. The argument was vague on her part and somewhat hard and reticent on mine. I wasn’t going to be cajoled again into any weakness or be infected with any–and there was a contagion of evil in the air. She kept trying to imply, without any convincing evidence to bring forward, that everything was all right. Yet she was too full of the thing itself–whatever it was–to build up a real story, and she wanted to catch at any credulous and acquiescent train of thought that might start in my head, and work that for all it was worth. After every reassuring suggestion she threw out, she stared at me eagerly, as if she hoped I’d launch into a comfortable moral lecture with the customary sweet at the end–which in this case would be her liberty. But I was wearing her away a little. Two or three times it needed just a touch of pressure to bring her to the point of tears–which, of course, was what I wanted–but I couldn’t seem to manage it. Almost I had her–almost possessed her interior attention–then she would slip away.

I bullied her remorselessly into a taxi about four o’clock and started for the station. The wind was raw again, with a sting of snow in it, and the people in the streets, waiting for busses and street cars too small to take them all in, looked cold and disturbed and unhappy. I tried to think how lucky we were to be comfortably off and taken care of, but all the warm, respectable world I had been part of yesterday had dropped away from me. There was something we carried with us now that was the enemy and the opposite of all that; it was in the cabs beside us, the streets we passed through. With a touch of panic, I wondered if I wasn’t slipping almost imperceptibly into Ellen’s attitude of mind. The column of passengers waiting to go aboard the train were as remote from me as people from another world, but it was I that was drifting away and leaving them behind.

My lower was in the same car with her compartment. It was an old-fashioned car, its lights somewhat dim, its carpets and upholstery full of the dust of another generation. There were half a dozen other travellers, but they made no special impression on me, except that they shared the unreality that I was beginning to feel everywhere around me. We went into Ellen’s compartment, shut the door and sat down.

Suddenly I put my arms around her and drew her over to me, just as tenderly as I knew how–as if she were a little girl–as she was. She resisted a little, but after a moment she submitted and lay tense and rigid in my arms.

“Ellen,” I said helplessly, “you asked me to trust you. You have much more reason to tr
ust me. Wouldn’t it help to get rid of all this, if you told me a little?”

“I can’t,” she said, very low–“I mean, there’s nothing to tell.”

“You met this man on the train coming home and you fell in love with him, isn’t that true?”

“I don’t know.”

“Tell me, Ellen. You fell in love with him?”

“I don’t know. Please let me alone.”

“Call it anything you want,” I went on, “he has some sort of hold over you. He’s trying to use you; he’s trying to get something from you. He’s not in love with you.”