“I would be glad if he were dead. Oh, I know I am awful, but it is like that. Think of him walking around this town day by day, and I will have to meet him; when I go uptown, when I go to school, I will be avoiding him exactly the way I used to look for him. Oh, if he would only go away.”
It is not only Ellen who would like to slay the dead ghosts of unworthy loves.
“He walks up and down, and doesn’t know I have looked at him. Oh, if he knew that, I think I should die [her journal goes on]. He walks up and down and doesn’t know that I so hate the sight of him. I don’t hate him, but just the sight of him—so awfully I hate it. Everything he does seems to me so tiresome; his loud laugh makes me feel sick, and he doesn’t know anything. I make-believe to myself that he walked all over town after me and got in my way and annoyed me until I said, ‘I will be very glad, Arthur, if you would cease these undesired attentions.’ How could he cease anything he had never begun, for it wasn’t at all like that it happened. I should feel so much happier if I only could have hurt him, too.”
This experience, so phantasmal and yet so poignant, led to the Zinias’ premature death. Conscience invaded Ellen now that disillusion had done its blighting work. There came a day when she could no longer keep to herself her deviation from the precise morals demanded by the Zinias.
It was after a walk toward evening up the mountain, full of pregnant silences, that she confessed:—
“You would despise me, if you really knew me. I’m not the kind of a girl we are trying to be.”
I HATE YOUR SOCIETY ANYWAY! I NEVER DID WANT TO BE AN OLD MAID
It shocked me and thrilled me at the same time.