"Excuse me!"
Without too much insistence she extended her fingers and moved her from the path of possible purchasers.
Dodo went, hurt, crushed and revolting. There had been nothing which the other had not had a right to do, yet in those seconds she had experienced the deepest humiliation a woman can receive from another, the disdain of caste.
She had come penitent and full of compassion. She went in a dangerous mood; this woman, perfectly correct, perfectly emotionless, perfectly cold and brilliant, might be Mrs. Massingale; she could never be his wife!
"No, that is not a marriage!" she said indignantly to herself.
The thing she dreaded, and hoped for, had come to pass. She forgave him, and she understood!
Yet she hesitated day after day, until ten had passed in a whirl, alternately resolved, alternately recoiling. She had no defined morality. She was one of a thousand young girls of to-day, adrift, neither good nor bad, quite unmoral—the good and the bad equally responsive and the ultimate victory waiting on the first great influence from without, which would master her. She had no home; she was alone, a social mongrel. She could only hurt herself. What her parents had left her was only a heritage of lawlessness. Yet she hesitated, frightened by some fear conjured up from an unconscious self, like thin remembered notes of village bells, across the tumult of worldly clamors. At last, when she could see before her no other face, when the sound of his voice was mingled with every sound that came to her ear, when nothing else diverted her a moment from the insistent drumming ache of the present, she yielded. She went in the afternoon, just before four, to the court in Jefferson Market where she knew he was, pushing her way through the miserable, the venal, the vermin of all nations, clustered and ill smelling.
He saw her instantly as she came into the aisle.