“Can I see her? Can I see my child?”
So they took me to something that lay swathed in linen. I started with a curious emotion of pain. That! so grotesque, so pitiful,—that, the gracious girl who was going to be so much to me, the sweet companion who was going to understand me as no one else could, the precious comfort of my declining years! Oh, the bitter mockery of it!
And so next day, alone in a single cab I took to the cemetery all that was mortal of Dorothy Madden.
END OF BOOK II
BOOK III—THE AWAKENING
CHAPTER I
THE STRESS OF THE STRUGGLE
“Look here, Madden, you really ought to try and shake off your melancholy,” said Helstern, as we sat in front of the Café Soufflet.
“To hear you call me melancholy,” I retorted, “is like hearing the pot call the kettle black. And anyway you’ve never lost an only child.”
“I believe you’re a little mad,” said the sculptor, observing me closely.
“Are we not all of us just a little mad? Would you have us entirely sane? What a humdrum world that would be! I hate people who are so egregiously sane.”