“I hate him,” she said, slowly, not passionately, but coldly, with calculation. Then she repeated it, “I hate him.... I hate him.”
She took off hat and wraps and let them fall to the floor, then walked across the room to her dressing-table and looked at herself in its mirror. She saw how pinched and white and strained she looked, and bit her lip.... On the dressing-table in a silver frame was a photograph, the photograph of a woman still young. It was a strong face, a gentle face, a face that in some vague way showed that the spirit within had not been satisfied or happy. Hildegarde lifted it in her hands.
“You married him,” she said, in a whisper. “Married him.... You lived with him of your own accord—for years.... How could you? How could you?”
Hildegarde did not know that she herself was the answer to that question. Born within a year of her mother’s marriage, she had tied her mother to that home and to the man who was the father of the child. It had not taken years to disillusion Marcia von Essen with respect to her husband; the first trying hours of marital life had sufficed to show her the sort of man to whom she had given herself, for he had shown her none of that gentleness, that consideration, that tenderness that form so sure a foundation for the coming years. More marriages are wrecked within twenty-four hours of the ceremony than are wrecked in the succeeding twenty-four years. Marcia von Essen’s was one of these.... She might have separated herself from him almost at the beginning of their marriage, but time was not given her to catch her breath and form the resolution when was forced upon her the knowledge that her thought must include a third being. So she remained, and so, for Hildegarde’s sake, she endured the years. “How could you?” Hildegarde asked. The photograph might have replied, “For you, my daughter.”
Hildegarde put down her mother’s picture and sat down on the rounding seat in the bay window. Her posture was girlish, childish; back against the wall, feet on the cushion, she drew her knees under her chin and stared out at the snow-covered lawn, the wealth of shrubs swathed in white, down the slope to the barren expanse of frozen lake. Her thoughts were dangerous thoughts, and to a reckless, turbulent soul thoughts likely to take material shape in rash action.
“I won’t stand it,” she said, in a whisper. “She had to live with him, but I don’t.”
That resolution was made. All that remained was to hit upon the means to carry it out. She would leave her home and her father, but how? And how could she make it certain that he could not follow her and drag her back? For drag her back he would, she knew.
She must have help; she must have a place to go. Arrangements must be made outside that house for her reception, and she could not go out to make them—and she was penniless!
“He’d help me,” she said, suddenly. “He’s got to.” The he was Potter Waite.
It was not with love that she turned to Potter, for she did not love him. She was not a girl given to sudden, unstable infatuations for young men. But she liked him, she trusted him. Events had coupled them in a manner which compelled her to think of him as she thought of no other young man.... She would ask him to help, to find some way, to devise some expedient. Potter was only a means to an end in this affair—he was not the end. She did not plan to elope with this young man; indeed, that idea never entered her hot little head.