[III]
It was in circumstances which, if not dramatic, were, at least, uncommon, that Leilah Verplank met Barouffski.
At Los Angeles, after her flight from Coronado, she caught an express that would have taken her East. Even so, it could not take her from herself, it could not distance memory, it could not annihilate the past. The consciousness of that obsessed her. Each of her thoughts became a separate throb. About her head formed an iron band. Her body ached. She felt hot and ill. She had a sense of thirst, a sense, too, of fear.
In the compartment where she sat, a stranger came. She hid her face, covering it with her hands. The stranger sidled in between them, looked her in the eyes, penetrated them, permeated her, shook long shudders through her, shrieked at her: “I am Fright!”
She cried aloud. No one heard. She got to the door.
In the section immediately adjoining were her women. Perplexed at the start by her unaccountable flight and, since then, alarmed by the abnormal excitability which she had displayed, both, at the sight of her then, rushed to her.
Salt Lake was the first possible asylum. There, weeks later, Leilah arose from one of those attacks, which, for lack of a better term, has been called brain fever.
Like fire, fever may consume, it does not necessarily obliterate. The past remained. But in that lassitude which fever leaves, Leilah was able to consider it with a wearied certainty that no immediate effort could be required of her then.
“Forget,” some considerate and subliminal self admonished. “Forget.”
Even in sleep she could not always do that. But though she could not forget the past, she could, she believed, barricade herself against it. The idea was suggested by the local sheet in which she found an item about neighbourly Nevada. The item hung a hammock for her thoughts, rested her mentally, unrolled a carpet for the returning steps of health.