“Three dollars a month,” deliberated Sophie. The cheapness would give her a sense of freedom that would make up for the lack of light and air. She paid down her first month’s rent.
Her house, securely hers. Yet with the flash of triumph came a stab of bitterness. All that was hers was so wretched and so ugly! Had her eager spirit, eager to give, no claim to a bit of beauty, a shred of comfort?
Over the potato-barrel she flung a red shawl, once her mother’s, and looked through her bag for something to cover an ugly break in the plaster. She could find nothing but the page torn from the college catalogue.
“It’s not so sunny and airy here as in your college office,” she said, tacking the photograph on the wall; “but maybe you’d be a realer man if once in your life you had to put up with a hole like this for a room.”
Sophie spread her papers on the cot beside her. With tense fingers she wrote down the title of her story, then stopped, and stared wildly at the ceiling.
Where was the vision that had haunted her all these days? Where were the thoughts and feelings that surged like torrents through her soul? Merely the act of putting her pencil to paper, her thoughts became a blur, her feelings a dumb ache in her heart.
Ach, why must she kill herself to say what can never be said in words? But how did Emerson and Shakespeare seize hold of their vision? What was the source of their deathless power?
The rusty clock struck six.
“I ought to run out now for the stale bread, or it will be all sold out, and I will have to pay twice as much for the fresh,” flashed through her mind.
“Oi weh!” she wailed, covering her eyes, “it’s a stomach slave I am, not a writer. I forget my story, I forget everything, thinking only of saving a few pennies.”