Her smile was tight. “Perhaps I have lived through things too quickly. But I know I like you too much to cheat you, which I should do if I married you. I can’t—can’t do it! Believe me, I would like to give you what you ask, but I haven’t it.”
“Is this the last word?” he said, half risen.
She nodded, her eyes full of tears.
He saw them, and touched her arm. “Don’t, don’t!” he said gently. “I suppose you know what is best for you!” The accent fell on the last word sadly. He rose; she saw him, a dim bulk on the light window-square as he stooped to gather up bags and umbrella; saw him passing her. The door closed behind him.
Florence, with a shiver, relaxed from her tension, leaning back in her chair a little weakly. Her eyes closed. All the glitter she had shown them on the platform had fallen away from her; and thus, with shut eyes, her unlighted face showed exhaustion so deep that peace seemed the next thing to it. The noise of the train swam heavily in her head. She had no thoughts, only—as now and again she opened her eyes—a vague noticing of small things; and then at sight of green onion-fields wheeling past the window, a sad stab of memory. She shut her eyes, lest some other sight remind her too cruelly of what was left behind. She did not sleep. She was unconscious of time in her deep, complete lethargy of soul and brain. When she opened her eyes again the lights were swinging down the middle of the car, and through the windows she looked out over water, beautiful violet-blue in a softly gathering dark. The train was puffing slower, and now a glimmering succession of windows shut out the water.
The dark tunnel of the ferry-house encompassed her, but the memory of the purple flash of sea lingered with a vivid pleasure—more vivid that the glimpse had been so short—as she followed the rush out of the car door. The cool, soft wind on her face, the crowd tearing to and fro, roused her. The “overland” was just pulling out; a string of electric lights, white jackets jumping to the platforms, faces peering from the windows, it passed her. She felt a queer throb, a wish to be going with it somewhere, outward bound. What had she to hold her anywhere? But even with the thought the sense of poignant personal loss would not rise up before her. Her lethargy was lost, but her consciousness, no longer concentrated upon herself, was relaxed to a keener perception of her surroundings—of the high, dusky-vaulted ferry-house, echoing full of voices and footsteps; of the fitful play of light on the foam churning through the tall piles of the ferry-slip; of the crowd she moved among, streaming down the ferry gangway, a succession of faces glimmering past, each stamped with its headlong personal object. They were still spurred and ridden by it, while she.... The salt breath of the sea rushed up to meet her, with suggestion of the immensities of oceans.
She found an outside seat forward.
It was an evening clear, moonless, with a marvelous purple over water and sky. Every light of the ships in harbor was reflected, a trailing glory, in the glassy bay; and the ferry was plowing through them, with its dull, monotonous pulse like the beat of a heart. The white bulk of a steamer moved directly before its course, white lights, green, red lights—the Nippon Maru outward bound. Florence’s eyes followed it. And there stirred faintly in her the passion she had always cherished for the mysterious other side of the world—Japan, and that great continent beyond it. And as the immensity unrolled before her—the thousands of miles, the millions of people with passions identical, with ideals unintelligible to hers, but in the great sum of existence as necessary—the vast, varied face of the world diminished, dwarfed her own identity.
She had one of those fortunate moments when, the body being very weary, the spirit takes its opportunity and mounts beyond the body’s demands. If she had put it to herself, she would have said she had “got outside of things.” It floated before her, more like an impression than a thought, that to have had one’s happiness was what counted, though it passed like the glimpse of purple sea. And the eye of the soul that could catch it, could treasure it up to carry into some dim, empty, echoing time-to-come. The time of activity, of struggle for what was most desirable, most beautiful, or most necessary to life—the delights, the sufferings, the defeating, the half successes—this time inevitably was ended. Sometimes the change life made was death, sometimes only another face of life, as now it came to her—a time of waiting, of watching, of trying to perceive and understand, from the passionate, personal motives acting themselves out around her, the great intention of the whole.
Before her the lights of the city were all alive, trailing around the water-front, marching over the hills, ringing them with fire, and trembling away into the large stars of the low, soft sky. Her hand was on the rail, and she dropped her chin upon it, looking longingly, searchingly into the heart of the glittering tangle, as if it were the veritable tangle of life.