When she could reach her room she turned on the full glare of the electric lights and went softly to the mirror. She stood for a long time, her hands tight against her breast, looking into the eyes that stared back at her. "He doesn't love you," she said to them. "He doesn't want you. It's some one else he wants—the girl you used to be. O Paul, how can I hurt him so! You'll hurt him more cruelly if you marry him. You can't be what he wants. You can't. You're some one else. You couldn't stand it. You can't make yourself over. After all these years. O Paul, my dear, my dear, I didn't mean to hurt you!"
Some hours later she remembered that a boat sailed for the Orient on the twentieth. She would have to act quickly, and it was good that there was so much to do.
CHAPTER XXIV
Early on the morning of the nineteenth she climbed the steps to the little brown house on Russian Hill. She had traveled all night from Masonville, awake in her berth, and she was very tired. She was so tired that it seemed impossible to feel any more emotion, and she looked indifferently at the sunny, redwood-paneled room so full of memories. A score of disconnected thoughts worried her mind; her mother's tearful face, the telegram to Washington for her passports, the steamer-trunk she must buy, Mabel looking at her enviously over the baby's head.
Brushing a hand across her blurry eyes, she sat down at her desk. She must write to Paul. She must tell him that she was going away; make him understand that their smiling farewell at the Ripley station was her good-by. She must try to show him that it was best, so that he would not hold her memory too long.
When she had finished, she folded the sheet carefully, slipped it into its envelope, and sealed the flap. It was done. She felt that she had torn away a part of herself, leaving a bleeding emptiness. Her brain, wise with experience of suffering, told her that the wound would heal, would even in time be forgotten, but her wisdom did not dull the pain.
A thousand memories rushed upon her, torturing, unbearable. She rose, trying to push them from her, reaching in agony for the anodyne of work. Her trunks must be packed; there were shelves of books to give away; she must telephone the tailor and the expressman. A horde of such details stretched saving hands to her, and a self-control strengthened by long use took her through them, with her chin up and a smile on her lips.
The luncheon table had never seen her gayer, amid the excited congratulations of the girls, and she rushed through an afternoon of shopping to meet them all for tea, and to spend a last intimate, warm, half-tearful evening with them around the fire.
"The old crowd's breaking up," they said. "Marian in France, and Dodo in Washington, and now Helen's going. Nothing's going to be the same any more."
"Nothing ever is," she answered soberly. "We can't keep anything in the world, no matter how good it is. And hasn't it been good—all this! The way we've cared for each other, and our happy times together, and all you've meant to me—I can't tell you. I don't think there's anything in the world more beautiful than the friendship of women. It's been the happiest year of my whole life."