“This is really the last time I’ll ever bother you,” she wrote, “but I do want to know what has happened to you, and how you feel about things. [pg 265] I can’t forget. All our troubles seem to have worn some sort of a permanent groove in my poor brain, and I believe the thought of you will be there till the day of my death.
“As, for me, I’m in society up to my eyes, and absolutely without the courage or energy to climb out. Those days in New York were the first and the last of my freedom. Now I’ve been introduced to everybody, and I have an engagement book that tells me what I’m going to do whether I want to or not for three weeks ahead. I’m a model of conduct and propriety for the simple reason that I can’t travel over a block without everybody that I know finding out about it.
“Of course it hasn’t all been a bore. I have had some fun, and I’ve met some really interesting people. I’ve gotten used to being married and my husband treats me kindly and gives me a good home. Sounds as if I was a kitten, doesn’t it? Well, I have very much the same sort of life as a kitten, but a kitten has no imagination and it has never been in love. Sometimes I think that I can’t stand it any longer. It seems to me that I’m not really living, as I used to imagine I would, but just being dragged through life by circumstances and other people—I don’t know what all. I still have desperate plans and ideas once in a while, but of course, I never do anything. When you come right down to it, what can I do?”
Ramon read this letter sitting on the sunny side of his house with his heels under him and his back against the wall—a position any Mexican can hold for hours. When he had finished it he sat motionless for a long time, painfully going over the past, trying ineptly to discover what had been the matter with it. More acutely than ever before he felt the cruel guerdon of youth—the contrast between the promise of life and its fulfillment. He felt that he ought to do something, that he ought not to submit. But somehow all the doors that led out of his present narrow way into wider fields seemed closed. There was no longer any entrancing vista to tempt him. Mentally he repeated her query, What could he do?
His thoughts went round and round and got nowhere. The spring sunshine soaked into his body. A faint hum of early insects lulled him, and to his nostrils came the scent of new-turned earth and manure from the garden where his man was working. He grew drowsy; his dissatisfaction simmered down to a vague ache in the background of his consciousness. Idly he tore the letter to little bits.
THE END