“He will.”
“You could write a note.”
“Then he wouldn’t believe; a note would be too gentle. He’d want to see me and talk, but if you tell him he’ll know that it’s final or I wouldn’t have chosen to tell him through a third person. Will you do it?”
“Yes.”
“I was going to leave myself,” explained Gloria with a wave of her hand toward the evidences of packing. “But I can’t. George has disappeared—absolutely disappeared—”
“When—where?”
“I said disappeared; that doesn’t mean he left a forwarding address. He slipped off into the nowhere, sometime between midnight and morning and of course I can’t move until we hear from him.”
“You can, too!” Ruth was intense in her excitement. “You can—you’ve given up the Prince; the next thing is to give up George. He’s been the cause of all your troubles. I know you don’t believe it, but he has—he’s hypnotized you—and if he’s disappeared you ought to be glad of it.”
Gloria looked at her curiously from between half-closed lids.
“Why do you think I won’t believe you? I don’t believe or disbelieve, I know that I have been hypnotized, or mad, or ill—something. I woke up this morning quite new— Perhaps it’s religion—” She laughed with something of her old careless mirth. “Anyway I’m quite sane now, and I do want to get back to New York so that I can begin rehearsals in Terry’s new play. I feel like working hard, like beginning all over again— I feel—so—so free, that’s the word, as if I had been in prison—a prison with mirror walls, every one of which reflected a distorted vision of myself. That’s all I could see—myself, always myself and always wrong.”