This, too, brought Kate out of her impersonation. Her whole figure straightened for a second, and—
“Oh, might I?” she said.
“I should be very glad. Will you come up to see him—one may look in at the door. He is in Uncle Edward’s spare chamber.”
As they threaded the involved halls of that rambling dwelling, Kate hurried on ahead. Eleanor, from the rear, threw out a word or two by way of direction. At the door, opened to get air of a dull and heavy morning, 259 they peered into the grim order of the sick room. The nurse had already stripped it to hospital equipment. His face, refined almost into beauty by pain and low-running blood, lay tilted to one side as he slept. The nurse touched her lips. Eleanor nodded. The nurse turned back toward her patient. Eleanor dared look at Kate.
Her color had changed from pale, back to the pink of life; now it was turning pale again. She noticed neither Eleanor nor the nurse; she stood as one in a universe unpeopled save by herself and another. Once, her two arms quivered with an involuntary outward motion, and once she swayed against the lintel.
And Eleanor, watching her through this wordless passage, gathered all the currents that had been running through her will into an indeterminate determination. In that moment she realized the full bitterness of a renunciation that does not mean renouncing a wholly dear and desired thing, but does mean renouncing the beloved thing which one is better without.
Kate turned at length. Eleanor, as their eyes met, could read in her face and body the 260 change as the actress took command once more. Kate flew at once to her hollow conventional phrases.
“The poor, poor boy!” she said. “Oh, we must all help!”
Eleanor turned away with the feeling that this made it harder for her to perform her renunciation—if real renunciation it were.
The day brought too much work, activity, purely material anxiety, for a great deal of thought. They had cut off the telephone in the main wing of the Tiffany house and switched the current to the instrument in Eleanor’s living-room. Most of the day she spent answering that telephone. People of whom she had never even heard, made anxious inquiries about the condition of Mr. Chester. Before night the newspapers became a plague. For in the afternoon, winged reporters, shot out in volleys for a “second day story,” had called at 2196 Valencia and found there no Sadie Brown. Hurrying down the back trail to the Emporium, they did discover an indignant little shop-girl of that name. Those reporters who had been with the wreck the night before found no resemblance in her to 261 the mysterious lady. Then came a bombardment, in person and by telephone, of the Tiffany house. The Judge, meeting all callers at the front door, lied tactfully. The city editors gave up sending reporters and took to bullying over the telephone; so that the burden of an unaccustomed lying fell upon Eleanor. At eleven o’clock, and after one voice had declared that the Journal had the whole account and would make it pretty peppery if the Tiffanys did not confirm it, Eleanor took the telephone off the hook and went to bed.