Kate Clephane, on her feet in the long swaying Pullman, looked about her at the faces of all the people in the other seats—the people who didn’t know. The whole world was divided, now, between people such as those, and the only two who did know: herself and one other. All lesser differences seemed to have been swallowed up in that....
She pushed her way between the seats, in the wake of the other travellers who were getting out—she wondered why!—at Baltimore. No one noticed her; she had no luggage; in a moment or two she was out of the station. She stood there, staring in a dazed way at the meaningless traffic of the streets. Where were all these people going, what could they possibly want, or hope for, or strive for, in a world such as she now knew it to be?
There was a spring mildness in the air, and presently, walking on through the hurrying crowd, she found herself in a quiet park-like square, with budding trees, and bulbs pushing up in the mounded flower-beds. She sat down on a bench.
Strength had been given her to get through that first hour with Anne ... she didn’t know how, but somehow, all at once, the shabby years of dissimulation, of manœuvring, of concealing, had leapt to her defence like a mercenary army roused in a righteous cause. She had to deceive Anne, to lull Anne’s suspicions, though she were to die in the attempt. And she had not died—
That was the worst of it.
She had never been more quiveringly, comprehensively alive than as she sat there, in that alien place, staring out alone into an alien future. She felt strong and light enough to jump up and walk for miles and miles—if only she had known where to go! They said grief was ageing—well, this agony seemed to have plunged her into a very Fountain of Youth.
No one could possibly know where she was. She had told her daughter that one of the aunts at Meridia was very ill; dying, she believed she had said. To reach Meridia one passed through Baltimore—it had all been simple enough. Luckily she had once or twice talked of the aunts to Anne; had said vaguely: “There was never much intimacy, but some day I ought to go and see them”—so that now it seemed quite natural, and Anne, like all her generation, was too used to sudden comings and goings, and violent changes of plan, to do more than ring up the motor to take her mother to the first train, and recommend carrying a warm wrap.
The hush, the solitude, the sense of being alone and unknown in a strange place to which no one knew she had gone, gradually steadied Kate Clephane’s mind, and fragments torn from the last hours began to drift through it, one by one. Curiously enough, it was Anne’s awkward little speech about giving her the house that came first—perhaps because it might so easily be the key to the rest.
Kate Clephane had never thought of money since she had been under her daughter’s roof, save on the one occasion when she had refused to have her allowance increased. Her disregard of the matter came not so much from conventional scruples as from a natural gay improvidence. If one were poor, and lived from hand to mouth, one had to think about money—worse luck! But once relieved from the need of doing so, she had dismissed the whole matter from her thoughts. Safely sheltered, becomingly arrayed, she cared no more than a child for the abstract power of possession. And the possession of money, in particular, had always been so associated in her mind with moral and mental dependence that after her break with Hylton Davies poverty had seemed one of the chief attributes of freedom.
It was Anne’s suggestion of giving her the house which had flung a sudden revealing glare on the situation. Anne was rich, then—very rich! Such a house—one of the few surviving from the time when Fifth Avenue had been New York’s fashionable quarter—must have grown greatly in value with the invasion of business. What could it be worth? Mrs. Clephane couldn’t conjecture ... could only feel that, to offer it in that way (and with it, of course, the means of living in it), Anne, who had none of her mother’s improvidence, must be securely and immensely wealthy. And if she were—