There was a pleasant silence in which neither felt the necessity of speech and then out of the fast approaching darkness Hertha asked: "Have you spent the most of your life in New York?"
"No, I only came here after my marriage. My life has been an ordinary one. A quiet girlhood, fifteen years of perfect married life, and now, a common struggle to keep from being despondent and to make both ends meet. The best for me is done."
"Fifteen years wasn't very long, was it?"
"One way it seems about fifteen minutes but another way it seems an eternity. It was all my life—I'm only existing now. And do you know," speaking in a low voice into the twilight, "I've never said this before, hardly to myself, but I came very near not marrying my husband. I was young and not romantically in love. He was ten years older and that seemed frightening. If it had not been for my mother, who appreciated him better than I, I doubt if I would have accepted him. Afterward, when we had lived together for months and I had given my whole heart to him, I used to waken in the night and shake with horror at the thought of what I might have lost. When I realized what we would have missed without our life together, I would grow chill with a perfectly unreasoning fear.
"I asked him once if he had ever questioned that he wanted me," Mrs. Pickens went on, "and he laughed and said not since the first May morning when I came to church in a blue gown and sat across the aisle from him. He surely knew his mind, but that's often the difference between men and women!"
Another silence and then Mrs. Pickens went within.
Hertha lingered trying to conceive of a love that had in it no romance and yet blossomed into passionate devotion. And as she strove to imagine such a condition, as she called up Dick's image and saw him playing with her in the snow, sitting by her at the opera, rowing with her in the park, her brain proved for a time obedient; and then the air was suddenly filled with the scent of orange blossoms.
"Oh, it's no use," she said despairingly, "I can't decide." And then in a tremor of excitement and determination, "Next Sunday I mean to have one more talk with Tom."