“I’ll tell it backwards.... This morning I found a bottle of wine in my apartment—the relic of that orgy of which you are so scornful. It was unopened. I decided to make a present of it to my landlady. She thanked me and rummaged on a shelf and gave me in return a book—a book with my name in it that she had found in her area-way. She had been saving it for me.... That’s the end of the story. Here’s the book.”
He took from his pocket a soiled copy of the Bab Ballads. She gazed at it.
“Oh! you took it with you?”
“To my new home, yes—to remember you by. But wait. It did make me remember you—too well—and so I flung it out the window. That’s what I am ashamed of, Rose-Ann. I know it’s absurd. But we’re telling each other the truth.... And it’s not Elva, nor anything else—but just what I did to that book, that I want to ask your forgiveness for....”
“Was she there?”
“Yes. That was why.”
“I’m glad you did it!”
“You don’t understand. That book—it’s more than just you, Rose-Ann: it’s all you stand for to me.... I wanted to get rid of it all.”
“What do I stand for, to you?”
He thought a moment, and then answered, as if the word had pushed itself up out of the deeps of his mind.