Gertrude Warrener did not remotely dream that she on this day passed the Rubicon lying between existence and life.
When the mind is sensible of inertia—the eyes catch sight of living forms, and the soul yearns toward something which it has not—it may be taken for granted that a life-breath has blown over the valley of dead bones.
In the case of Gertrude Warrener, it was indeed a tomb in which she awakened, and she did not know that she had been immured.
In her seventeenth year, George Warrener, just received into a subordinate position in a New York banking and broking firm, began to pay her his bashful attentions. With no spoken words on his part that she could remember—nor could he for the life of him have recalled the formula—there was an engagement. She married him before her eighteenth birthday.
As she sat in the library, all image of the youthful lover was completely effaced from her mind. He was now like hundreds and dozens of other middle-rank business men. Of medium height, stocky, his hair and short, stubby mustache nondescript, his eyes blue, wide apart and rather small, he was a successful type and entirely sacrificed as an individual. He often said:
“I look like a prosperous Wall Street man, and that is as near as I shall ever come to it—to look like it.”
But in spite of his dapper appearance, Warrener was an overworked drudge. He worked so hard and so long, his daily trips on unhealthy ferries and hot cars sapped his vitality to such an extent, that all his life had been spent and lived by the time he crossed at night the threshold of his home.
Gertrude in the little library opened the pages of the Slocum Daily slowly. She read the town gossip, a local weather prediction, an account of the hospital fair; and as she rocked and ate one after the other the chocolate marshmallows she had a feeling of freedom, whose cause was due simply to the fact that she had changed her point of view—due to the humble novelty of her transposition.
George’s library smelled of stale tobacco. She had sensitive nostrils, and was beginning to find the dead odor unpleasant, when at this point she fell upon an item in the Slocum Daily which held her attention: