Mary could only stare.
“And I think it was big of you,” the voice went on, now a choked and awed voice, “to try to save Jack by sacrificing yourself—by being willing to acknowledge yourself his—his mistress, and accept that humiliation, in order to protect him. I could never have done that either.”
Still Mary, sure manager of her destiny, could not speak—could only stare at the white face which had begun to work.
“I shall return to Chicago to-night,” the girl went on. “In a week or two I shall make my aunt write Jack’s father, giving no reason, stating I no longer care for Jack and wish everything broken off. And I shall write, confirming this. That will put me out of the way—I’ll no longer be a source of danger to you and Jack. I guess that’s all. Good-bye.”
She thrust the marriage certificate into Mary’s hands and turned and started rapidly out. Then she abruptly turned and came back; and she gripped Mary’s hands, and her blue eyes were flooding.
“I can’t like you—yet. But I’m not going to let myself be mean about this,” she said huskily, in awe and humility. “I wish I were as fine as you are! You are wonderful—wonderful!”
Suddenly she leaned forward and kissed Mary’s cheek; and then, this time, she was gone.
Mary gazed after her with wide eyes, then sank limply into a chair. She had won—for the time being; but that she had won did not at this moment even touch her thoughts; nor just then was her mind trying to justify her by saying that Maisie, as now she saw her, was too good for Jack, and that her own action, whatever its motives, had saved Maisie from a life of certain unhappiness. Just then she was dazed by the uncalculated twist of the girl’s action; unsuspected, unanalyzable things were tumultuously stirring, quickened into life by that swift, tear-wet kiss which still thrilled her cheek—by the fervid declaration that she was fine and wonderful. That girl, tears in her eyes, had called her fine and wonderful!...
She seemed, with all those sudden strange things surging within her, to be sitting there a woman unknown to herself. And then out of this chaos, there rose a clear-cut, definite sentence, that remained fixed before her mind—a sentence of Clifford’s, spoken with impersonal grimness: “There is a big woman in you—but if you are to be changed, only Life can do it.”... Was this what it meant, that chaos within her? After all, had Clifford been right? Was Life doing something to her?
Bewildered, breathless, almost fearfully, she sat regarding this strange, unknown woman stirring within herself....