She didn’t know why she was going southward rather than northward, except that southward lay the Brooklyn Bridge, and beyond the Brooklyn Bridge lay Beehive Valley, and within Beehive Valley the Excelsior Studio, and in the Excelsior Studio the faint possibility of a job. She was already thinking in the terms that went with the old gray rag and the battered hat, and had come back to them as to her mother-tongue. In forsaking paradise for the limbo of outcast souls she was at least supported 264 by the fact that in the limbo of outcast souls she was at home.
She was not frightened. Now that she was out of the prince’s palace she had suddenly become sensationless. She was like a soul which having reached the other side of death is conscious only of release from pain. She was no longer walking on blades; she was no longer attempting the impossible. Between her and the life which Barbara Walbrook understood the few steps she had taken had already marked the gulf. The gulf had always been there, yawning, unbridgeable, only that she, Letty Gravely, had tried to shut her eyes to it. She had tried to shut her eyes to it in the hope that the man she loved might come to do the same. She knew now how utterly foolish any such hope had been.
She would have perceived this earlier had he not from time to time revived the hope when it was about to flicker out. More than once he had confessed to depending on her sympathy. More than once he had told her that she drew out something he had hardly dared think he possessed, but which made him more of a man. Once he harked back to the dust flower, saying that as its humble and heavenly bloom brightened the spots bereft of beauty so she cheered the lonely and comfortless places in his heart. He had said these things not as one who is in love, but as one who is grateful, only that between gratitude and love she had purposely kept from drawing the distinction.
She did not reproach him. On the contrary, she blessed him even for being grateful. That meed he gave her at least, and that he should give her anything 265 at all was happiness. Leaving his palace she did so with nothing but grateful thoughts on her own side. He had smiled on her always; he had been considerate, kindly, and very nearly tender. For what he called the wrong he had done her, which she held to be no wrong at all, he would have made amends so magnificent that the mere acceptance would have overwhelmed her. Since he couldn’t give her the one thing she craved her best course was like the little mermaid to tremble into foam, and become a spirit of the wind.
It was what she was doing. She was going without leaving a trace. A girl more important than she couldn’t have done it so easily. A Barbara Walbrook had she attempted a freak so mad, would be discovered within twenty-four hours. It was one of the advantages of extreme obscurity that you came and went without notice. No matter how conspicuously a Letty Gravely passed it would not be remembered that she had gone by.
With regard to this, however, she made one reserve. She couldn’t disappear forever, not any more than Judith of Bethulia when she went to the tent of Holofernes. The history of Judith was not in Letty’s mind, because she had never heard of it; there was only the impulse to the same sort of sacrifice. Since Israel could be delivered only in one way, that way Judith had been ready to take. To Letty her prince was her Israel. One day she would have to inform him that the Holofernes of his captivity was slain—that at last he was free.
There were lines along which Letty was not imaginative, and one of those lines ran parallel to Judith’s experience. When it came to love at first sight, she 266 could invent as many situations as there were millionaires in the subway. In interpreting a part she had views of her own beyond any held by Luciline Lynch. As to matters of dress her fancy was boundless.
Her limitations were in the practical. Among practical things “going to the bad” was now her chief preoccupation. She had always understood that when you made up your mind to do it you had only to present yourself. The way was broad; the gate wide open. There were wicked people on every side eager to pull you through. You had only to go out into the street, after dark especially—and there you were!
Having walked some three or four blocks she made out the figure of a man coming up the hill toward her. Her heart stopped beating; her knees quaked. This was doom. She would meet it, of course, since her doom would be the prince’s salvation; but she couldn’t help trembling as she watched it coming on.
By the light of an arc-lamp she saw that he was in evening dress. The wicked millionaires who, in motion-pictures, were the peril of young girls, were always so attired. Iphigenia could not have trodden to the altar with a more consuming mental anguish than Letty as she dragged herself toward this approaching fate; but she did so drag herself without mercy. For a minute as he drew near she was on the point of begging him to spare her; but she saved herself in time from this frustration of her task.