For a week she lived alone, enjoying the sensation 281 of being hidden, languidly savouring the warm comfort of isolation.
She had not sent for her belongings. She purchased new personal effects, enchanted to be rid of familiar things.
There was no snow. She walked a great deal, moving in unaccustomed sections of the city at all hours, skirting in the early winter dusk the glitter of Christmas preparations along avenues and squares, lunching where she was unlikely to encounter anybody she knew, dining, too, at hazard in unwonted places––restaurants she had never heard of, tea-rooms, odd corners.
Vanya wrote her. She tossed his letters aside, scarcely read. Ilse and Palla wrote her, and telephoned her. She paid them no attention.
The metropolitan jungle fascinated her. She adored her liberty, and looked out of beryl-green eyes across the border of license, where ghosts of the half-world swarmed in no-man’s-land.
Conscious that she had been fashioned to trouble man, the knowledge merely left her indefinitely contented, save when she remembered Jim. But that he had checked her drift toward him merely excited her; for she knew she had been made to trouble such as he; and she had seen his face that night....
Ilse, on her way home to dress––for she was going out somewhere with Estridge––stopped for tea at Palla’s house, and found her a little disturbed over an anonymous letter just delivered––a typewritten sheet bluntly telling her to take her friends and get out of the hall where the Combat Club held its public sessions; and warning her of serious trouble if she did not heed this “friendly” advice.
“Pouf!” exclaimed Ilse contemptuously, “I get those, too, and tear them up. People who talk never strike. Are you anxious, darling?”