She had the chance to succeed. The people seemed ready to listen to her if she had something to say; and she had something to say—why not say it?
She arose, tense and white with resolution, and opened the stove door and dropped the packet in, and closed the door and held it as if she feared the packet might explode in her face, or cry out at her. In her poems she would have had the heroine fling it in the grate and snatch it out again, but having no grate the stove must serve, and there could be no snatching at the packet, no remorseful kisses of the charred body. It was gone in a dull roar.
She sat down and waited till the flame died out, and then drew up to her desk and wrote swiftly for an hour. She grew sleepy at last, as the tumult of her brain grew quieter. Just before she went to sleep all her lovers came before her: Carl, in the strawberry-scented glade; William de Lisle, shining of limb, courtesying under the lifting canvas roof; Dr. Thatcher, as he looked that afternoon in the school-room; then Forest Darnlee, with the physical beauty of William De Lisle, but vain and careless; then Professor Ellis, seated at his desk in the chalk-laden air, or perched on the ladder beneath the great telescope, a man who lived in abstract regions far from sense and sound; then Tom Harris, lithe, graceful, always smiling—Tom, who had the songs of birds, the smell of flowers, the gleam of sunset-water leagued with him—who almost conquered, but who passed on like a dapple of purple shadow over the lake.
And now she faced two others, for she could see that Owen was turning to her from Mary, and he had great charm. He was one of the cleanest-souled men she had ever known; he had, also, a strange touch of paganism, of mystery, as of free spaces and savage, unstained wildernesses, and he could give her a home, and he would allow her freedom. He would be her subject, not her master.
Then there was Mason—of him what? She did not know. He was outside her knowledge of men. She could neither read his face nor understand his voice. He scared her with a look or a phrase. Sometimes he looked old and cynical, but tonight how tenderly and sympathetically he had spoken! How considerately silent he had been!
When she awoke, Mary was standing looking down at her.
"If you're going to have any breakfast, Rose, you'd better be stirring. It's nine o'clock, and everything's ready to clear away. What kind of time did you have?"
Rose resented her question, but forced herself to answer:
"Beautiful!"
"I saw you in the box. Owen and I were in the second balcony. You were just scrumptious! I wanted to throw a kiss at you." She fell upon Rose and squeezed her, quilt and all, in her long arms. "My stars! I wish I was lovely and a poet."