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After that there was a silence, out of which Nannie asked: “Does your head ache, Mary?”

“A little.”

“Can’t I get you something?”

“No. After I’ve rested a bit I’ll take a walk.”

Mary’s walk led her by the lighted shop windows. The air was keen and cold and helped her head. But it did not help her heart. She had a sense of suffocation when she thought of Nannie.

She stopped in front of one of the shops. There were dolls in the window, charming, round-eyed, ringleted. One of them was especially captivating, with fat blond curls, fat legs, blue silk socks and slippers, crisp frills and a broad blue hat.

“How I should have loved her when I was a little girl,” was Mary’s thought as she stood looking in. Then: “How a child of my own would have loved her.”

She made up her mind that she would buy the doll–in the morning when the shop opened. It was a whimsical thing to do, to give herself a doll at her time of life. But it would be in a sense symbolic. She had no child to which to give it; she would give it to the child who was once herself.

She came home with a lighter heart and with the knowledge of what she had to do. She put on her blue house coat and sat down to her desk with its embossed leather fittings, and there under the lovely, lamp which Kingdon Knox had given her she wrote to Nannie.

She gave the letter to Nannie the next morning. “I want you to read it when you are all alone. Then tear it up. It must always be just between you and me, Nannie.”

Nannie read the letter in the lunch hour. She got her lunch at a cafeteria and there was a rest room. It was very quiet and she had a corner to herself. She wondered what Mary had to say to her, and why she didn’t talk it out instead of writing about it.

But Mary had felt that she could not trust herself to speak. There would have been Nannie’s eyes to meet, questions to answer; and this meant so much. Paper and pen were impersonal.

“It isn’t easy to talk such things out, Nannie. I should never have written this if I had not realized last night that your feet were following the path which my own have followed for fifteen years. And I knew that you were envying me and wanting to be like me; and I am saying what I shall say in this letter so that I may save you, Nannie.

“When I first came into Mr. Knox’s office I was young like you, and I had a lover, young and fine like Dick, and he satisfied me. We had our plans–of a home and the happiness we should have together. If I had married him, I should now have sons and daughters growing up about me, and when Christmas came there would be a tree and young faces smiling, and my husband, smiling.

“But Mr. Knox talked to me as he talked to you. He told me, too, to wait–for Prince Charming. He told me I was too fine to be wasted. He hinted that the man I was planning to marry was a plain fellow, not good enough for me. He talked and I listened. He opened vistas. I saw myself raised to a different sphere by some man like Mr. Knox–just as well groomed, just as distinguished, just as rich and wonderful.

“But such men don’t come often into the lives of girls like you and me, Nannie. I know that now. I did not know it then. But Mr. Knox should have known it. Yet he held out the hope; and at last he robbed me of my future, of the little home, my fine, strong husband. He robbed me of my woman’s heritage of a child in my arms.