“Some of my vileness I am burning,” she said, coming forward and kissing Ilse on both cheeks.
Then, looking Palla steadily in the eyes, she bent forward and touched her lips with her own.
“Nechevo,” she said; “the thing that dwelt within me for a time has continued on its way to hell, I hope.”
She took the pale girl by both hands: “Do you understand?”
And Palla kissed her.
When they were seated: “What religious order would be likely to accept me?” she asked serenely. And answered her own question: “None would tolerate me––no 337 order with its rigid systems of inquiry and its merciless investigations.... And yet––I wonder.... Perhaps, as a lay-sister in some missionary order––where few care to serve––where life resembles death as one twin the other.... I don’t know: I wonder, Palla.”
Palla asked her in a low voice if she had seen the afternoon paper. Marya did not reply at once; but presently over her face a hot rose-glow spread and deepened. Then, after a silence:
“The paper mentioned me as Vanya’s wife. Is that what you mean? Yes; I told them that.... It made no difference, for they would have discovered it anyway. And I scarcely know why I made Vanya lie about it to you all;––why I wished people to think otherwise.... Because I have been married to Vanya since the beginning.... And I can not explain why I have not told you.”
She touched a rosebud in the vase that stood beside her, broke the stem absently, and sat examining it in silence. And, after a few moments:
“As a child I was too imaginative.... We do not change––we women. Married, unmarried, too wise, or too innocent, we remain what we were when our mothers bore us.... Whatever we do, we never change within: we remain, in our souls, what we first were. And unaltered we die.... In morgue or prison or Potter’s Field, where lies a dead female thing in a tattered skirt, there, hidden somewhere under rag and skin and bone, lies a dead girl-child.”