He yielded, still with his reflective but incurious manner; and when she left the shop a quarter of an hour later the check was in her little bag beside the amethyst necklace. "I am glad I didn't have to sell the necklace," she thought. "Now I'll find a hotel and write to mother, and it will all be settled. It will all be settled," she repeated in a joyous tone; and this joyousness, overflowing her breast, showed in her eyes, in the little quivering smile on her lips, and in her light and buoyant step over the snow. A weight had been lifted from her heart, and she felt at peace with the world, at peace with the shivering passers-by, at peace even with George. The wind, hastening her walk, stung her face till it flushed through its pallor, and sent the warm blood bounding with happiness through her veins. Under the stainless blue of the sky, it seemed to her that the winter's earth was suddenly quickening with the seeds of the spring.
In the Waldorf she found a corner which was deserted, except for an elderly man with a dried face and a girl in a green hat, who appeared to be writing to her lover; and sitting down at a little desk behind a lamp, she wrote to her mother without mentioning George, without explaining anything, without even making excuses for her failure to keep her promise. She knew now that George had never meant that her mother should live with them, that he had never meant that they should take an apartment, that he had lied to her, without compunction, from the beginning. She knew this as surely as she knew that he was faithless and selfish, as surely as she knew that he had ceased to love her and would never love her again. And this knowledge, which had once caused her such poignant agony, seemed now as detached and remote as any tragedy in ancient history. She was barely twenty-two, and her love story had already dwindled to an impersonal biographical interest in her mind.
When she had finished her letter, she placed the check inside of it, and then sat for a minute pensively watching the girl in the green hat, whose face paled and reddened while she wrote to her lover.
"It seems a hundred years ago since I felt like that," she thought, "and now it is all over." Then because melancholy had no part in her nature, and she was too practical to waste time in useless regrets, she rose quickly from the desk, and went out, while the exhilaration of her mood was still proof against the dangerous weakness of self-pity. "It's life I'm living, not a fairy tale," she told herself sternly as she posted the letter and left the hotel. "It's life I'm living, and life is hard, however you take it." For a few blocks she walked on briskly, thinking of the shop windows and of the brightness and gaiety of the crowd in Fifth Avenue; but in spite of her efforts, her thoughts fluttered back presently to herself and her own problems. "After all, you can't become a victim unless you give in," she said grimly; "and I'll die rather than become a victim."
Her walk kept her out until five o'clock, and when she entered the house at that hour she found her mother-in-law in the front hall giving directions to Burrows. At sight of Gabriella she paused breathlessly, and said with undisguised nervousness:
"A very queer-looking person who says she was sent by your mother has just come to see you, dear—a seamstress of some kind, I fancy. As she looked quite clean, I let her go upstairs to the nursery to wait for you. I hope you don't mind. She was so eager to see the baby."
"Oh, it's Miss Polly!" cried Gabriella; and without stopping to explain, she ran upstairs and into the nursery, where little Frances was cooing with delight in Miss Polly's arms.
The seamstress' small birdlike face, framed by the silk quilling of her old lady's bonnet, broke into a hundred cheerful wrinkles at the sight of Gabriella. Even the grotesqueness of her appearance—of her fantastic mantle trimmed with bugles, made from her best wrap in the 'seventies, of her full alpaca skirt, with its wide hem stiffened by buckram, of her black cotton gloves, and her enormous black broadcloth bag—even these things could not extinguish the pleasure Gabriella felt in the meeting. If Miss Polly was ridiculous at home, she was twice as ridiculous in New York, but somehow it did not seem to matter. The sight of her brought happy tears to the girl's eyes, and in the attempt to hide them, she buried her face in the warm, flower-scented neck of little Frances.
"She's the peartest baby I ever saw," remarked Miss Polly with pride. "Wouldn't yo' ma dote on her?"
"Wouldn't she? But how did you leave mother and Jane and the children? The baby must be a big boy now."