“But after—after what you told me, surely, oh, surely, you don’t want to hear from him?”
I was fearful of her answer. If she was waiting, hungering for a letter from him, it would have been too much even for me.
“That’s just it—I don’t want to. It’s all in the past, as if it had happened a hundred years ago. I want it to stay there—to be dead.”
She looked into my eyes, a deep look, that for some inexplicable reason reminded me of Wuzzy’s. I have long realized that my point of view, my mental processes, are too remote from hers for me ever to see into her mind or understand its workings. But I was certain that she meant what she said. My poor Lizzie, coming up out of the Valley of the Shadow, with her feeble feet planted on the past.
A few days after this she was well enough to sit up in bed with her hair brushed and braided, and read her letters. One was from Vignorol asking her why she had not come for her lessons.
She gave it to me, remarking:
“I wish you’d answer that. Tell him I’ve been sick, and that I’ll never come for any more lessons.”
I dropped my sewing, making the round eyes of astonishment with which I greet her unexpected decisions.
“You’re not thinking of giving up your singing?”
“Yes, forever.”