Then what was the answer?  She had killed Lucas, but was it an accident?  And there must have been a witness, or they would have had nothing to fear.  He wrote out on a bit of paper three names, and sat looking at them: 

Hattie Thorwald
Jean Melis
Clifton Hines.

XLI

Elizabeth had quite definitely put Dick out of her heart.  On the evening of the day she learned he had come back and had not seen her, she deliberately killed her love and decently interred it.  She burned her notes and his one letter and put away her ring, performing the rites not as rites but as a shameful business to be done with quickly.  She tore his photograph into bits and threw them into her waste basket, and having thus housecleaned her room set to work to houseclean her heart.

She found very little to do.  She was numb and totally without feeling.  The little painful constriction in her chest which had so often come lately with her thoughts of him was gone.  She felt extraordinarily empty, but not light, and her feet dragged about the room.

She felt no sense of Dick’s unworthiness, but simply that she was up against something she could not fight, and no longer wanted to fight.  She was beaten, but the strange thing was that she did not care.  Only, she would not be pitied.  As the days went on she resented the pity that had kept her in ignorance for so long, and had let her wear her heart on her sleeve; and she even wondered sometimes whether the story of Dick’s loss of memory had not been false, evolved out of that pity and the desire to save her pain.

David sent for her, but she wrote him a little note, formal and restrained.  She would come in a day or two, but now she must get her bearings.  He was, to know that she was not angry, and felt it all for the best, and she was very lovingly his, Elizabeth.

She knew now that she would eventually marry Wallie Sayre if only to get away from pity.  He would have to know the truth about her, that she did not love any one; not even her father and her mother.  She pretended to care for fear of hurting them, but she was actually frozen quite hard.  She did not believe in love.  It was a terrible thing, to be avoided by any one who wanted to get along, and this avoiding was really quite simple.  One simply stopped feeling.

On the Sunday after she had come to this comfortable knowledge she sat in the church as usual, in the choir stalls, and suddenly she hated the church.  She hated the way the larynx of Henry Wallace, the tenor, stuck out like a crabapple over his low collar.  She hated the fat double chin of the bass.  She hated the talk about love and the certain rewards of virtue, and the faces of the congregation, smug and sure of salvation.

She went to the choir master after the service to hand in her resignation.  And did not, because it had occurred to her that it might look, to use Nina’s word, as though she were crushed.  Crushed!  That was funny.