“Some day, perhaps,” he went on, watching her, “we can go back. They’ll have forgotten us there in a few more weeks.”
He saw her face change at once, and dared go no further.
“Yes—some day,” she answered, and the conversation ended.
The long summer burned itself on through July into August. Glaring, golden mornings melted into breathless noons, which smoldered away into fiery sunsets. The leafage in the garden hung motionless, and exhaled strange, aromatic perfumes. In the evenings the palms stood black against the rose-red west like paintings of sunset in the desert. The city they had left, wrapped in its mantle of fog, appealed to the memories of the exiles as a dim, lost paradise.
To the girl whose simple life had passed in a seclusion almost cloistral, but at its loneliest marked by refinement, the sudden intimacies, the crude jovialities, of the boarding-house were violently repelling. She shrank from contact with her fellow-boarders, touched by, but unresponsive to their clumsy overtures of friendship, alarmed by their ferociously playful personalities. Fortunately her coolness was set down as shyness, and she suffered from none of that rancor which the boarder who is suspected of “putting on frills” is liable to rouse.
The long, idle days seemed interminable to her. At first she had found occupation in an attempt to beautify the two rooms she and her father rented. Of hers she had made a sitting-room, transforming the bed into a divan covered with a casing of blue denim and a heap of shaded blue cushions. Under one of the balconies she discovered a quantity of forgotten flower-pots, and in these she had planted cuttings of gay-colored geraniums, and set them along the window-sills and the balcony-railing. But the work was soon completed, and a second interval of terrifying vacant hours faced her. This time she tried to seek intellectual diversion, and joined the free public library. She had often secretly deplored her own ignorance; now was the time to repair this defect; and she carried home many serious works, great thoughts of great minds with whom she had never before had an opportunity of becoming acquainted.
But poor Viola was not of the women who find in the exercise of the brain a method of healing the hurts of a wounded heart. At times a sense of piercing misery possessed her. There were hours when her loneliness pressed upon her like a weight, when the sense of what she had lost was unbearable as a fierce, continuous pain. Then, in the hope of escaping from the torment of “remembering happier things,” she went out and, in the blistering heat under which the streets lay sweltering, walked aimlessly. If fatigue overcame her she sat down on one of the benches in the little plazas that dot the city, and there a graceful, listless figure slipped back over the intervening gulf to the days when the sunshine had been bright and her own heart was full of it.
Sometimes rebellion against the fate which had shut her out from happiness rose within her. A beloved companionship, no matter at what cost, was better than this waste of desolation. One life is all of which we are sure; why not, then, seize what we can of that one? How terrible, in the darkness of death, to realize that we have lost all that might have made this world so rich and sweet! Oh, the frightful thoughts of seeing at the end that we have relinquished joy and love for a dream, for nothing! For the first time in a life singularly free from event or developing experience, she met that dark second self which dwells in each of us.