The memory of their parting fell on her abruptly. It had all been a hoax. He did not love her. And that which a moment before had seemed so wonderfully right, now smarted as a shame. The butterfly wings snapped. She could find no tears. She looked forward, in dull pain, dry-eyed, to a life of abject crawling.
There was the inevitable wave of bitterness. What right had he to teach her flight and then break her wings? But this mood could not last. She loved him. All her pride, all her ideals of life and work—everything firm—deserted her. Nothing mattered any more except not to lose him. There was no humiliation, through which she would not crawl to regain his companionship. What did this talk of Love matter? She wanted to be with him, to feel his arms once more about her. Her whole being cried out that she was "his," utterly "his." Had she not loved him since their first encounter? She would go to him, asking no terms.
In the rush of this passionate impulse, she jumped out of bed—and saw the note under her door. The dream came back to her. Walter had called her. She had wasted these miserably unhappy moments in bed, and all the while his message had been waiting her!
"Dear Yetta. Isadore called up about 8.30 and asked me to tell—"
The note crumpled up in Yetta's hand. And there, alone in her room, with no one to see her, she had only one idea. She must not make a scene.
She smoothed out the note and went through the motions of reading it. Every muscle was tense, her teeth were gritted in the supreme effort to dominate the storm of wild impulses within her, to keep her head above the buffeting waves of circumstance. Mechanically she bathed and brushed her hair and dressed herself. Her mind was rigid—clenched like her teeth.
But subconsciously—behind this outward calmness—a momentous conflict was raging. In those few minutes, alone in her strange new quarters, with no one by to help or encourage her, she faced the fight and won. She did not win through unscathed,—modern psychology is teaching us that no one does come through such conflicts without wounds, which heal slowly, if at all.
In the din of the spiritual fray a new outlook on life had come to her. It was not so sharp a change as that which Walter's caresses had caused, but it was more fundamental—in the way that spiritual matters are always more significant than things physical.
Life as she had seen it was a ceaseless, desperate struggle, a constant clash of personalities, an unrelenting war of social classes. In an external, rather mechanical way she had been involved in this struggle. She looked forward to being "a striker" all her life. But she had always thought of herself as a part of the conflict. Now—and this was the new viewpoint—it seemed that the fight was taking place within her. The strategic position, the key to the whole battlefield, the place where the fiercest blows were to be exchanged, was her own soul. If she was defeated there, the fight was over—as far as she was concerned.
It was not to be until years afterwards that she came to a full understanding of what that half-hour had meant to her. It was to take many months before she could arrange her life in accord with this new outlook. But as she poured out the coffee, which Sadie had left on the back of the stove, she knew that she had won this first fight in the new campaign. For the moment, at least, she was the Captain of Her Soul.