"Dear Mr. Rossitur." Her writing was large and round with black down strokes. This was the first time that she had written to him. How hot the room was! Perhaps, with the window open.... She tried again.
"Dear Mr. Rossitur,
"Thank you for your letter. I quite understand. I expect it was the hot afternoon. It seems to have affected a lot of people. John got a slight touch of sunstroke. Perhaps you had one too—I quite understand you did not mean it. I was angry at the time, but now we will forget all about it. Please don't worry any more.
"Yours sincerely,
"Mary Robson."
It did not seem a very wonderful production, to have taken nearly two hours to write, but it was what she meant to say, and she could not think of a grander way in which to say it. Besides, she must reassure him some how that she was not angry. He must not suffer even a momentary humiliation for her own deliberate and shameless fault.
She blotted her letter and re-read it, repeating aloud the written words. What, after all, was the use of saying anything when there was one thing alone that she wanted to say, and could not? Quickly she tore the paper in small pieces, and let them drop into the waste-paper-basket. She walked to the window, and thence to the mantelpiece, then up and down the room that had become too small for the tireless thoughts which began to attack her in regular procession.
By the fire-place, she realized again the triumph of that moment in the cornfield, and the two hours afterwards when deliberately she had blinded herself to every consideration but the intensity of her desire for his love—when she had believed only what she wanted to believe, and forgot everything which common sense and propriety and experience recalled. Up the room again, she confronted the disaster of John's illness and the shock of her probable responsibility. Back again by the tables and chairs that she touched in passing with her fingers, she lived again through the hours of fearful expectation, awaiting the return of John's memory and the ensuing scene. Finally, by the door, she received once more that letter from David, when, as the hottest shame of all, she read that she had no cause for shame, that her fruitless waiting after church on Sunday and her flight up the fields had been the truth, and the quivering ecstasy of her stolen delight a sentimental lie.
That was what she was—a sentimental neurotic fool. Cheap, vulgar, sentimental. Those names hurt even more than calling herself disloyal, which she knew she was. Thinking herself starved for romance, and snatching at the first young man who came along, however unwilling he might be, she had known, oh, she had known all right, all along, that he could not care.
She had failed John. She had shamed David. Well, there was still the village. Hunting? There was that interview with him, and the long vista of defeat and deprivation it disclosed. But she had not lost the village. There at least lay a way to regain self-respect.
That was what one must have—self-respect. She couldn't bear life without it. She couldn't bear that fugitive shame that kept her starting at every sound, that burned her at every thought of David.