"Yes, that's pleasant, after you've jabbed it full of holes!"
"Let me go, Edith," I said and pulled away my wrist with a jerk.
"Are you going to give it back to him?"
"Yes, I am!" I retorted and fled down the stairs, out of the door, across the porch, and into the moonlit garden as fast as I could go.
"Here, Breck—here's your ring! Take it. You're free. You don't need to hang around, as you say, any more. And I'm free, too, thank heaven! I would have borne the glory and the honor of your name with pride. Your mother's friendship would have been a happiness, but for no name, and for no woman's favor will I descend to a stolen marriage. You're mistaken in me. Everybody seems to be. I'm mistaken in myself. I don't want to marry you after all. I don't love you, and I don't want to marry you. I'm tired. Please go."
He stared at me. "You little fool!" he exclaimed, just like Edith. Then he slipped the box into his pocket, shrugged his shoulders, and in truly chivalrous fashion added, "Don't imagine I'm going to commit suicide or anything tragic like that, young lady, because I'm not."
"I didn't imagine it," I replied.
"I'm going to marry Gale Oliphant," he informed me coolly. "I'm going to give her a ring in a little box—and she'll wear hers. You'll see." He produced a cigarette and lit it. "She's no fish," he added. "She's a pippin, she is. Good night," he finished, and turned and walked out of the garden.
Three days later I went away from Hilton. Edith's tirades became unendurable. I didn't want even to eat her food. The spinet desk, the bureau, the chiffonier, the closet, I cleared of every trace of me. I stripped the bed of its linen and left the mattress rolled over the foot-board in eloquent abandonment. The waste-basket bulged with discarded odds and ends. One had only to look into that room to feel convinced that its occupant had disappeared, like a spirit from a dead body, never to return.
I went to my sister Lucy's. I did not write her. I simply took a morning train to Boston and called her up on the 'phone in her not far distant university town. She came trotting cheerfully in to meet me. I told her my news; she tenderly gathered what was left of me together, and carried the bits out here to her little white house on the hill.