"What makes you say that?"
"You were going to marry the General."
"Well, I wanted a home. I wanted some of the things you had always had. I'm not old, and I am tired of being a machine."
For just one moment her anger blazed, then she laughed with something of toleration.
"Oh, you'd never understand if I talked a year. So what's the use of wasting breath?"
She said "Good-bye" after that, and Jean watched her go, hearing the padded steps—until the front door shut and there was silence.
After that, with almost a sense of panic, she sped through the empty rooms, finding the papers after a frantic search, and gaining the street with a sense of escape.
Yet even then, it was sometime before her heart beat normally, and always after that when she thought of Hilda, it was against the chill and gloom of the empty house, with that look upon her face of dark resentment.