"Then you will let me go away with Mother? You won't stop loving me, Laurie?"
"I'll shake you for talking nonsense," he said, getting up.
She hated him for escaping her, but her mind was made up and the next day when her mother called the morning of departure was set.
Settling her pince-nez on her flat nose before her fixed and despairing eyes, Mrs. Price pressed Winnie's face to her flat black bosom. "I'm so glad, dear. It was so foolish of my little girl to hold out against having her parents do anything for her. Your father is so good, Winnie. There is nothing I can ask for you that he isn't willing to give. You mustn't deprive him of that pleasure."
Winnie thought of Laurie and was stiff in her mother's embrace, yet at that moment could not have said which of them was most irritating.
Mrs. Price always avoided Laurence's name.
When Mrs. Price had gone Winnie lay in her room on the couch, excited and oppressed. She said death to herself, and the word echoed inside her like a cry down a long hall. Then the echo was lost in the deeps of darkness. But it continued to quiver below the surface of her life.
Winnie thought of being sick. She was harsh with a knowledge of herself. She would not be sick. Closing her eyes she imagined her mouth. With a kind of horror of its own act, it pressed Laurence's. She woke up.
The noonday sun outside was pale with rain. Winnie heard footsteps in the still noon street. Death. The dancing word fluttered ahead of the hurrying feet.