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.
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.
