“I’ve always led—such an active life,” she said, in a very unsteady voice. “I should think you could understand, Robert—”
“I do!” he said grimly.
“You don’t!” she cried. “You don’t! You—”
She could not go on. She bent her head and pretended to be cutting up something on her plate, but she could not see clearly. He never would understand that she was doing this only for love of him, only so that she might not be here in his home as the sinister third person who saw everything and—
She started at the touch of Molly’s hand on her arm.
“If that’s your way to be happy, darling,” said Robert’s wife, and Mrs. Champney saw tears in her honest eyes.
V
Mrs. Champney envisaged her life as divided into epochs, each one with its own significance and its own memories. There was her childhood, there was her girlhood. There were the early days of her married life, when she and her husband had been alone. There were the crowded and anxious and wonderful years when her children had been little. There was the beginning of her widowhood, overshadowed with anguish and loneliness, yet with a dark beauty of its own. There was her tranquil middle age, and there was her business life.
She had begun it on Tuesday, and this was Friday. It had lasted four days, yet it seemed to her quite as long as all the years of her youth. It seemed a lifetime in itself, in which she had acquired a new and bitter wisdom.
The train stopped at her station, and, with a crowd of other home-going commuters, Mrs. Champney got out and hurried up the steps to the street, to catch a trolley car; but she was not quick enough. By the time she got there the car was full, and she drew back and let it go. She never was quick enough any more. She seemed to have been transferred into a world of terrific speed and vigor, where she was[Pg 279] hopelessly outdistanced, hopelessly old and weary and slow.