“Have pity! Speak to me! Give me only a word!” David begged me.
I wanted to speak to him, to stretch out my hands to him and call him over, but I couldn’t move my body. No voice came from my lips no more than if I was locked in my grave.
I was dead, and the David I loved was dead.
I married Sam because he came along and wanted me, and I didn’t care about nothing no more.
But for long after, even when the children began coming, my head was still far away in the dream of the time when love was. Before my eyes was always his face, drawing me on. In my ears was always his voice, but thin, like from far away.
I was like a person following after something in the dark.
For years when I went out into the street or got into a car, it gave a knock my heart—“Maybe I’ll see him yet to-day.”
When I heard he got himself engaged, I hunted up where she lived, and with Sammy in the carriage and the three other children hanging on to my skirts, I stayed around for hours to look up at the grand stone house where she lived, just to take a minute’s look on her.
When I seen her go by, it stabbed awake in me the old days.
It ain’t that I still love him, but nothing don’t seem real to me no more. For the little while when we was lovers I breathed the air from the high places where love comes from, and I can’t no more come down.