And so the tale is ended. I don’t think I shall ever write any more. In the autumn, when I started this manuscript, I just intended to put down the happenings of a lonely woman’s life, to read over on evenings when looking back was pleasanter than looking forward. Now, without intending to, I have written a story, which is not my fault, as the story happened to intrude itself into the lonely woman’s life, greatly to her surprise, and a good deal to her sorrow. But this is the finish of it. There is no more to tell. The heroine has gone, if to come back not the same heroine. The hero—you know as much about him as I do. And the author—well, the author is just where she was, a widow of thirty-three, doing light housekeeping in an eighteen-foot apartment. It can’t be much of a story because it hasn’t got anywhere; nobody has died, nobody has married. So to myself—for I am going to put this away in a trunk and never let a soul see it—I make my bow as an author.
Good night, Evelyn Drake. As a sadder and wiser woman I take my leave of you. Good-by.
EPILOGUE
This has been a day of coincidences. They began in the afternoon and ended an hour ago. And now, past midnight, in my sitting-room looking out on the lights of the Rond Point, like Bret Harte’s heroine, “I am sitting alone by the fire, dressed just as I came from the dance”—only it wasn’t a dance, it was the opera.
But to get to the coincidences: This afternoon I was unpacking an old trunk full of odds and ends that I brought when we came to Paris last autumn, and at the bottom of it I found the manuscript I had written four years ago at Mrs. Bushey’s. I laid it on the top to read over in some idle moment when Roger wouldn’t catch me. For though we’ve been married three years and talked over everything that ever happened to either of us, Roger doesn’t know the whole story of that winter.
Of course I have asked him if he wasn’t really in love with Lizzie, and he always laughs and says he wasn’t, that he was attracted by her and interested in her as a type. I don’t contradict him—it’s best to let men rest peacefully in their innocent self-delusions. Besides, if I pressed the subject we might have to go on to Lizzie and Masters, and that’s the part of the story he doesn’t know. Sometimes I’ve thought I’d tell him and then I’ve always stopped. Why should I? It’s all come out right. Lizzie has traveled along the line of least resistance in one direction and reached success, and Roger has done the same thing in another and reached me. She must be happy if fulfilled ambitions can do it, and we are, with each other and last year—to crown it all—our boy.
Well, I won’t go into that—I get too garrulous. When a woman of thirty-six has a baby she never gets over the pride and wonder of it.
We came over to Paris last autumn for Roger to do some reading in the Bibliothèque Nationale, and took this charming apartment near the Rond Point. On bright mornings I can look into the little park and see Roger Clements IX sitting out there in his perambulator studying Parisian life. The day suddenly strikes me as unusually fine and I go out and sit on the bench beside him and we study Parisian life together, while his nou-nou knits on a camp-chair near by.
Bother—I keep losing sight of the coincidences which are the only reason I began to write this. To resume:
During these four years we have tried to keep track of Lizzie. It was difficult because, of course, after the first few months, she stopped writing. If it hadn’t been for Betty we should have lost her entirely, but Betty, being the source of supplies, did know, at least, her whereabouts. I may add, en passant, that Mrs. Ferguson stood by her contract to the end and now is enjoying the fruits thereof. If she isn’t known as the patron of the greatest living prima donna, she is known as a lady who made a career possible to one of the rising singers of Europe.