Our carriages had met and passed and for an instant I had felt her suddenly rigid at my side. I looked over and saw something out of Letty’s past,—a thin, crooked old lady, very black, bejeweled and grotesquely dressed, who was agitating a pink parasol as though it were a bell-rope, to attract our attention. The next second, and we had passed.
“Your mother?”
“Yes.”
She had been too startled to deny it.
“Letty,” I said eagerly, for the tone of her voice threw an air of romantic mystery about her figure to me, “don’t you want to,—can’t you tell me something of your life?”
She shook her head.
“To you, if to any one. Don’t ask me. It is too painful!”
She added, and at such moments I felt twenty years rushing in between us:
“Life is only a succession of doors to be closed and never reopened. I never do.”
Something made me reply: