Did the world still seem to him as hopeless as it did at the time of his writing the letter? That gave him an idea.
"Where is that letter?" he asked, cutting across the track of her calculated approaches. "What became of it?"
She did not evade him. She was too surprised.
"I gave it," she owned, "to one of our doctors at home. For a medical congress."
"The devil you did!" Raven permitted himself. "Milly, sometimes I think you advanced women—O Lord!"
"What else could I do?" Milly inquired, with her deliberate fair-mindedness, which was, he miserably knew, a part of her culture. "Surely, you wouldn't suppress evidence. And it won't be traced to you. You're simply Mr. X."
Raven was silent. He was thinking what a fool he had been to unpack his heart with words, and that if he told Milly so he should simply be unpacking it some more. He looked at the clear winter day occupying itself out there without him, and wondered why the deuce he couldn't put on snowshoes and tramp off his discontent leaving her to fight her boredom by the fire. She'd brought it on herself, hadn't she? Nobody wanted her to come. Was there some hidden force in women, their apparent vulnerability to the harsh world conditions that were bound to crush out even them in the end? They seemed so weak you had, in mercy, to reënforce them and then they proved so horribly strong, and used their strength against you, depleted as you were by fighting for them. Anyway, if he could get Milly's blood to moving and pump some of this hill air into her she, too, might be a more wholesome citizen of even an unfeeling earth.
"Want to go to walk, Milly?" he suggested seductively, and she looked at him pleasantly, grateful for the tone, at least.
"No," she said, "we're so cozy here."
Cozy! it might be cozy, if that meant being choked. But he thought he could stand a little more of it, and then he would at least drop asleep and snore. The indiscretions of the body were terrible to Amelia. And he did fall into a hopeless lethargy, and only about five o'clock, when the early dark had come, threw it off and got to his feet.