When Henrietta reached her room she lighted the gas and stood for many minutes before her mirror looking at her face as it was reflected there. It was thus she took stock of herself, trying to find and appraise the real Henrietta. The face she saw surprised her, for she had come to her room feeling that she was a wrecked and ruined Henrietta. She had half expected to see the face of a hag, lined with wrinkles of moral ugliness, with eyes of a slinking liar. She saw the face of a comely woman, younger by far than her actual years warranted. On the face were no lines whatever, either of age or sin. It was the frank face with the frank eyes of unsoiled innocence.
She bent nearer and studied her eyes. They looked back at her with no signs of deceitfulness. They were clear, steady, honest. Her troubles, her mistakes, her prevarications, had left no marks. She stood back, so that her full bust was reflected, and she tilted the mirror and stood away from it so that she saw all of her figure.
She had meant, if the mirror told her that, to accept the verdict that she was old, decaying, morally and physically vile. Instead she found herself to be all she had imagined she was not. From outward view she was lovely, and her eyes refused to tell her she was depraved.
Henrietta undressed slowly, pausing again and again to drop into periods of thoughtfulness, out of which she came slowly. She was trying to rearrange her life, as if she meant, before she slept, to draw an indelible line between the Henrietta she had been and the Henrietta she meant to be.
One thing she saw clearly. There must be restitution for the ill she had wrought Freeman; for she still held herself to blame for what he had become. This restitution—since there was no longer hope of Freeman—must be made vicariously to Lem.
There were other things she must do. The lies she had told must be untold. Then, too, Carter Bruce and Gay must be set right on love's path, for Gay still held eternal resentment against Carter. Johnnie Alberson must be turned away forever. If she could hold her school position another year, or perhaps two years, she must pay Miss Susan and Gay and Lorna, and reimburse Johnnie for Freeman's pilferings. It could all be done. She fell asleep finally resolved on all these things, and slept peacefully.
Lem, for his part, went back to his lean-to and his cot among the junk in the same mind as before. He did not worry much about what women said. When the time came, if he did not hear from his father, he would cut loose from River-bank.
Henrietta made it a point to see Johnnie Al-berson the next morning before he went to his drug store, and told him, as one saying the final, unalterable word, that she would never marry him. He received this sad information cheerfully.
“Did n't think you would,” he said. “Had n't the least hope of it.”
“I'm glad,” Henrietta said. “It makes it better when you feel so.”