To her father she wrote a letter.
Yet even to him she could not tell the facts. It seemed now when circumstances seemed to imperil her secret that she clutched it even more tightly to herself. She could not bear the thought of comment breaking in like a destructive barrage on the secret glory and beauty she cherished. In her absorption she did not think much of consequences or possible worry for any one. Only as she told Mrs. Miller that she wanted to pay up for her week and that she had been called out of town, did it occur to her from a comment of Mrs. Miller’s, that her mother was coming in a day or two. The complication puzzled her—then she overrode it boldly. It was one of the things that had to be. So she wrote a note for her mother and entrusted it to Mrs. Miller. It was only a few lines to tell her that she had left the city—“I’m sorry that I can’t be more definite about my plans. There’s nothing to worry you, mother. It’s quite all right and I’m not doing anything I shouldn’t. So please don’t worry about me. Only trust me, won’t you? I know you will.” She sent her love and for all her assurances on paper that she knew her mother would trust her she sealed it with a dubious look.
In the letter to her father she was, if not more informative, at least more expansive.
It was incoherent, reassuring, happy, sad—the kind of letter that carries with it great fear to the one who reads it and who sees how delicate the balance is on which the future is being weighed.
Freda mailed the note to her father, left the one for her mother with Mrs. Miller and went to the station. Almost before she knew it the long train, with a jerk of its loose hung body had gathered itself together and moved out of the yards through the scattering, blackened railroad district. She watched the little houses and let her mind sink into a blur of remembrance and anticipation. She was going to Gregory. No more waiting for letters, no more dreams. Whatever it was that was to come, it was reality—something to feel and to do—not to wait for.
She slipped her wedding ring on her finger and displayed her hand a little absurdly on the edge of the window casing. Marvelous symbol—that ring, she thought. Too bad that people had come to regard it so disdainfully. How ill it must have been treated to have sunk into such disrepute. Across the aisle of the day coach she saw a like ring on the hand of a woman. It was a fleshy hand and the coarse pink skin pushed itself up on either side of the encircling band but Freda felt kinship and friendliness. With this unknown woman, with the unintelligent face she almost felt it possible to converse intimately—as if she might cross to her and say, “I am Mrs. Gregory Macmillan. Are you going far?”
When the shadows fell thick across the prairie and a white-coated waiter, a shade more important in his manner that he had been in passing through the Pullmans, had intrigued a fair number of the day-coach passengers into the diner, Freda rose a little stiffly. Her chin had red marks on it where she had cupped it in her hand for so long and there were streaks of coal dust under her eyes. She made a perfunctory and inadequate attempt to look presentable and faced a new adventure. She had never eaten on a train in her life.
The warm bustle and luxury of the place stirred her senses and brought her out of her lonely rhapsody into an appreciation of what went on around her. The adventure spirit came to the surface. Freda Thorstad—sitting at a tidy table in a dining-car, on the way to her husband. There was no disloyalty to Gregory’s illness that she could not resist the enchantment of shining dishes which looked like silver and warm and savory smells and smiling, interesting travelers, with above and around it all the clatter and rush of the train, moving on to a hundred destinations, a hundred tragedies and comedies and romances. Her thoughts at least admitted no staleness as a possibility.
The meal stood out in her memory. She never forgot it. Tentatively she ordered, tea, biscuits and lamb chops. When the lamb chops came they lay on a platter with little sprigs of parsley offering them up and made her very hungry. They looked delightful but inadequate. She ate hungrily, for these last few days she had had little food.
Four—five—dragging hours. She bought a magazine with a flaring girl on its cover and read avidly, her mind sinking into its soporific fiction with weariness, getting respite from her own sharp and vivid thoughts.