Minnie took a long breath of fresh air and she raised her head. It seemed to her almost as though she could already feel a new ring on the third finger of her left hand.
(1910)
It was not a large room, this private parlor on an upper story of the immense hotel; and its decorations, its ornaments, its furniture, its carpets, had the characterless commonplace befitting an apartment which might have a score of occupants in a single month. Yet she had spent the most of the winter in it; those were her pretty cushions (on the hard sofa), and that was her tea equipage on the low table by the fireplace (with its gas-log). The photographs in their silver frames were hers also, and so were the violets that filled a Rookwood bowl on the top of the writing-desk near the window. But as she glanced about in search of something that might make her feel at home, she found nothing to satisfy her longing. The room was a room in a hotel, after all; and she had failed wholly to impress her own individuality upon it. To recall her vain efforts only intensified her loneliness.
The hotel was full, so they said, and it held a thousand souls and more; and as she walked aimlessly to and fro within her narrow space, she wondered whether any one of the thousand felt as detached and as solitary as she did then—as she had felt so often during the long winter. She paused at the window again, and gazed at the houses far down below her on the other side of the narrow street; they were at least homes, and the women who dwelt there had husbands or sons or fathers—had each of them a man of some sort for her to lean on, for her to cling to, for her to love, for her to devote herself to, and for her to sacrifice herself for.