Then she let her busy thoughts dwell on her first triumphant year in New York, on many memories of the growing belief of her friends that she was the daughter of an old and aristocratic Kentucky family, of her interviews and her invitations, of her first intoxicating draught of publicity, of her gradual dismay as she found herself being forgotten, of her months of silent and agonized effort, that resulted in nothing, of her restless nights and her feverish days, when her spirit cried out for some balm for the itch which was burning and consuming her. She was no fool, she knew; she was as clever as other women. But some essential touch of imagination, some necessary element of creativeness, was not hers; and it had been imposed upon her to seek by sheer strategy and despairing strife that which came so lightly to the hand of others.
As she lay there alone in her rocking berth her withered and barren heart itself grew appalled at the thought of those years of smallness, of meanness, of deceit and duplicity, and endless lies. The enormity of her wrong-doing overwhelmed her. And the bitterest sting of all lay in the fact that so much of it was irreparable, that she had wronged not only the living, but the dead as well.
The one appeasing oasis in that arid desert of deceit and self-seeking was the memorial week she had journeyed back to the little Kentucky town of her childhood and there watched over the erection of a granite shaft beside the sadly neglected grave of a young Northerner who had once come so intimately into her girlhood life.
She was not all bad, not all bad, she cried out to herself, piteously! It was not yet too late. It might cost her much, but Love would show her the way. That old dead past should be wiped out. She would tell her husband everything. She would hold nothing back from him, and, with her slate once clean, from that day she would show him, by her devotion to him and his work, by her patient help, by her humility and her tenderness, how she could be good, as other women—as the best of other women.
Yet it would be better, she decided, on second thoughts, to wait until after their marriage. If he, too, should forsake her at the last moment she would have nothing left to her in all the world. No, she must cling to him, she said, whatever happened, at whatever cost. She needed him; she was not strong enough to fight her fight alone. For him, and with him, she could do it. But alone, by herself, she could not do it. She would go with him to Repellier and tell them everything. Repellier could do what he cared to, it would make little difference; other things, after that, would scarcely count. And she could reason out her answer and her excuses to the world later. Perhaps he might even be willing to let bygones be bygones, when he saw and understood the new turn things had taken. But on that one point she was decided—she would, some day, tell her husband everything.
Then her thoughts traveled lightning-like back to the present moment, and her one haunting fear crept up into the foreground of her consciousness. What if she should yet be too late! What if the die had already been cast? She felt that Hartley would never forgive her that last and bitterest lie. Why had she let her heart run away with her; why had she told him so soon? Why had she not made sure before she had capitulated so utterly? Even to have confessed and repented, even to have thrown herself to the utmost on his goodness and his generosity would have been safer. But that chance now was gone.
Would she be too late? That was the question she asked herself again and again as the rhythmical "Hurry-Hurry" of the car-wheels smote on her ears once more. They used to tell her that she was lucky; she remembered it to her joy; she clung to the belief that luck would still be with her.
Cordelia had passed a sleepless night when the Montreal express drew rumblingly down into the darkness of the Grand Central tunnel. She had found it impossible to eat, but a cup of strong coffee seemed to have refreshed her. The air was raw and cold as she finally stepped out into the vaulted gloom of the depot, and her breath hung in little white clouds as she pushed her way hurriedly toward the carriage-stand, where a pack of yelping and barking cab-men surrounded her, like hounds about a timorous quarry. She stepped into a public automobile, and started at once for the office of her publisher.
As she turned into the early morning quietness of Fifth Avenue, and the old, familiar, intangible smell of the city stole up into her nostrils, it seemed as though she had stepped back into life and the world again. Had she not dreamed a dream, she asked, as the very intangibility of that city odor crept up to her, teasing to be remembered and named. Here was the world where she had lived and fought and worked, here was where her sterner and wider and darker life had opened out before her. Here she had passed her happiest and her most miserable moments. That lost week in the sleepy old northern city on the St. Lawrence seemed mockingly unsubstantial. Which was the real, she asked herself, as she rolled down the familiar, smooth asphalt. And which, from that time on, was to be the unreal?