“Yes. He hasn’t been at Pratt Institute at all. He flunked his entrance exams. He didn’t let his people know, but has been taking all the money they’d sent him. Has a position in a Brazilian importing house, and has been studying Portuguese all winter. They are sending him down there in an important place—and he hopes he’ll never see this ratty old country again. He even said he’d marry me, if ...”
“And there was no return of the old ardour?”
“No, Judith, only a sick disgust.”
II
They were still talking when Larimore came home, surprised and a shade annoyed when he found that Eileen was there. He had but two tickets, and he wanted to be alone with his wife.
“Don’t tell him,” the girl whispered when he left the room to dress for dinner. “He is just beginning to respect me a little. I so want his—respect.”
When dinner was over she went to her room. No, she was not ill. She only wanted to be alone. If Lary had planned an evening at the theatre, thinking that she would spend the night at Rye, there was no reason for a change in his plans. She was glad they were going out, so that she might be alone. She knew the meaning of hypsos, now that she had made the descent, within the brief space of an hour, from that height to bathos, the lowest depth of sordid physical reality. She wanted to play again the winged notes that had carried her beyond the farthest reach of her own being—to purge her soul of the earth-taint that was in her.
“You are perfectly sure you are all right?” Judith asked when she told her good-night. “You won’t brood or cry?”
“No, I am past all that. When you strike bottom—there isn’t any farther to go.”