But conscientious though she was in her work, and careful to have her evenings occupied, she was still forlorn. Life was purposeless to her. She was working for self alone, and she who had never cared to excess for self, now cared nothing at all. In her own eyes her one value was her value to Stilson. She reproached herself for what seemed to her a low, a degrading view, traversing all she had theretofore preached and tried to practice. But she had only to pause to have her heart aching for him and her thoughts wandering in speculations about him or memories of him.
Her friends—Joan, Evelyn, Theresa—wondered at the radical changes in her, at her abstraction, her nervousness, her outbursts of bitterness. She shocked Joan and Evelyn, both now married, with mockeries at marriage, at love, at every sentiment of which they took a serious view. One day—at Joan’s, after a tirade against the cruelty, selfishness, and folly of bringing children into the world—she startled her by snatching up the baby and burying her face in its voluminous skirts and bursting into a storm of sobs and tears.
“What is it, Emmy?” asked Joan, taking away the baby as he, recovering from his amazement, set up a lusty-lunged protest against such conduct and his enforced participation therein.
Emily dried her eyes and fell to laughing as hysterically as she had wept. “Poor baby,” she said. “Let me take him again, Joan.” And she soon had him quiet, and staring at a large heart-shaped locket which she slowly swung to and fro just beyond the point, or rather, the cap, of his little lump of a nose. “I’m in a bad way, Joan,” she went on. “I can’t tell you. Telling would do no good. But my life is in a wretched tangle, and I don’t see anything ahead but—but—tangles. And as I can’t get what I want, I won’t take anything at all.”
“You are old enough to know better. Your good sense teaches you that if you did get what you want, you’d probably wish you hadn’t.”
“That’s the trouble,” said Emily, shaking her head sadly at the baby. “My good sense in this case teaches me just the reverse. I’ve seen a man—a real man this time—my man morally, mentally, physically. He’s a man with a mind, and a heart, and what I call a conscience. He’s been through—oh, everything. And error and suffering have made him what he is—a man. He’s a man to look up to, a man to lean upon, a man to—to care for.” Her expression impressed Joan’s skepticism. “Do you wonder?” she said.
“No.” Joan looked away. “But—forget—put him out of your life. You are trying to—aren’t you?”
“To forget? No—I can’t even try. It would be useless. Besides, who wants to forget? And there’s always a chance.”
“At least”—Joan spoke with conviction—“you’re not likely to do anything—absurd.”
“That’s true—unfortunately. I couldn’t be trusted. I’m afraid. But—” Emily’s laugh was short and cynical—“my man can.”