"You're all right for money?" Castleton stammered awkwardly. "I mean—there's—oh, damn it, Jenny!"
He pounded over to the window, huge and disconsolate.
"Why ever on earth should I want money? What's the matter with next Friday's Treasury?"
"Perhaps, Jenny, you would come out with me once, if I waited for you one night?"
"Please don't. I should only stare you out. I wouldn't know you. I don't ever ever want to see any of you again."
She ran from the studio, vanishing like a flame into smoke.
That night when Jenny went back alone to Stacpole Terrace, she saw on the table in the cheerless parlor the post card from Maurice, and close beside it the green hat bought in September still waiting to be re-shaped for the spring. She threw it into a corner of the room.
Chapter XXV: Monotone
JENNY's first thought was an impulse of revenge upon the opposite sex comparable with, but more drastic than, the resolution she had made on hearing of Edie's disaster. She would devote her youth to "doing men down." It was as if from the desert of the soul seared by Maurice, the powers of the body were to sweep like a wild tribe maiming the creators of her solitude. Maurice had stood for her as the epitome of man, and it was to be expected that when he fell, he would involve all men in the ruin. This hostility extended so widely that even her father was included, and Jenny found herself brooding upon the humiliation of his share in her origin.
This violent enmity finding its expression in physical repulsion defeated itself, and Jenny could no longer attract victims. Moreover, the primal instincts of sex perished in the drought of emotion; and soon she wished for oblivion, dreading any activity of disturbance. The desert was made, and was vast enough to circumscribe the range of her vision with its expanse of monotony. Educated in Catholic ideals, she would have fled to a nunnery, there coldly to languish until the fires of divine adorations should burst from the ashes of earthly love. Nunneries, however, were outside Jenny's set of conceptions. Death alone would endow her with painless indifference in a perpetual serenity; but the fear of death in one who lacked ability to regard herself from outside was not mitigated by pictorial consolations. She could never separate herself into audience and actor. Extinction appalled one profoundly conscious of herself as an entity. By such a stroke she would obliterate not merely herself, but her world as well. Suicides generally possess the power of mental dichotomy. They kill themselves, paradoxically, to see the effect. They are sorry for themselves, or angry, or contemptuous: madness disintegrates their sense of personality so that the various components run together. In a madman's huggermugger of motives, impulses and reasons, one predominant butchers the rest for its own gratification. Whatever abnormal conditions the shock of sorrow had produced in Jenny's mental life, through them all she remained fully conscious of her completeness and preserved unbroken the importance of her personality. She could not kill herself.