"I think I'll go now, and—write a letter," the girl faltered.
"Go by all means, dear," Miss Pritchard bade her, "but don't write the letter to-night unless it's imperative. I have tickets for 'The Good-Natured Man' for to-morrow night, so if you can put off the letter, hop right into bed and get a good rest in order to be fresh for it."
CHAPTER XXIV
It was Sunday afternoon, nearly a week later. Elsie sat alone by the window with a writing-tablet in her lap, gazing out at the row of houses across the street. But though the new-fallen snow on roof, cornice, and iron grating transformed the familiar scene, and though snow in such profusion and splendor was a new and wonderful experience to her, the girl wasn't really seeing the landscape any more than she was writing a letter. Realizing the fact after half an hour of stony silence, she rose, dropped her writing materials, and crossing the room, threw herself down on the hearth-rug with a gesture of despair.
It wasn't merely because she couldn't write the letter—which, by the way, was that which she had given as an excuse for withdrawing on the evening of Mr. Graham's call. It was true that writing to her stepmother—something that had been growing increasingly difficult for some time—had become practically impossible since that evening. But that was, in a way, a minor detail. For everything, everything had become impossible since the hour she had heard his recital of that experience of Cousin Julia's youth.
"There's no use," the girl cried out within herself, "I simply cannot stand it. I can't go on so. Cousin Julia's gone to a funeral. I'll have one while she's gone and bury everything deep down. There's nothing else to do. Now that I know for deadly certain that Cousin Julia would hate me if she knew, I can't go on being—as I am. Why, what he did wasn't dishonest. It was only, as Mr. Graham said, less than honest. And look at me!"
It was true that Cousin Julia hadn't hated him, even when he wasn't sorry about the wrong itself, Elsie repeated; for this was by no means the first or second time she had gone over the matter since that night; indeed, she had scarcely thought of anything else since. Still, she wouldn't have anything more to do with him, and must have despised him, which was worse. And it was also true that she would even have forgiven him utterly if he had sinned in a moment of temptation. And again the girl lamented bitterly that she hadn't done something even worse if it could have been committed in hot blood, and therefore followed by repentance, confession, and forgiveness. Only last evening Cousin Julia had read some verses from Browning which had filled her heart with a longing that was like remorse—something about a "certain moment" which "cuts the deed off, calls the glory from the grey." Were her wrong-doing only of the sort to be neatly cut off in that manner, how gladly would she own up. How certain would she be of obtaining full forgiveness, and how blissfully could she go on thence-forward!
But hers wasn't that sort. Hers was the sort that goes on and on and on. After making the beginning, there was no hope, any more than there was of stopping a ball when one starts it to rolling down a steep, smooth hill. And besides, it was of the very nature of that which had hurt Cousin Julia so cruelly in the case of her lover of twenty-odd years ago. For it was for Elsie's own advantage that she had entered upon the course of deceit, and it was she that was profiting by it, daily and hourly. She had imposed herself upon one whom she had no claim whatever upon for the sake of making things easier and pleasanter for herself—of gaining her own way. And wasn't she continuing the imposition largely for the same reason?
No, she wasn't doing that—at least not now. Absolutely selfish as her motive may have been in the first place, these last days had shown her that another element was now involved. Her longing to be an actress remained the same. Her distaste for the idea of life at the parsonage in Enderby had been increased almost to horror by the glimpses she had had through her friend's letters of what seemed to her its dreary and complacent domesticity. Nevertheless, at this moment she felt that she would give up the former and accept the latter without a murmur if she could thereby measure up to Cousin Julia's standard, and yet, in the process, hurt neither her nor Elsie Marley.