Where, then, was Anthony March?  Nowhere above her horizon, to-day at all events.  The memory of him had been with her much of the two last sleepless nights.  She had told over the tale of her moments with him again and again. (Did any one, she might have wondered, ever love as deeply with so small a treasury of golden hours for memory to draw upon?) But she could not, somehow, relate him at all to her present or her future.  Her love for him was an out-going rather than an in-coming thing.  At least, her thoughts had put the emphasis upon that side of it; upon the longing to comfort and protect him, to be the satisfaction to all his wants.  Not—­passionately not—­to cling heavily about his neck, drag at his feet, steal his wayfarer’s liberty,—­no, not the smallest moment of it!  This present helplessness of hers then, which heightened her need for him, served also to bolt the doors of her thoughts against him.

Her recollection of the next few hours, though it contained some vignettes so sharp and deeply bitten in as to be, she fancied, ineffaceable, was in the main confused.  She must have called upon ten or a dozen advertisers in various suburban districts of the city (she avoided addresses that were too near home and names where she suspected hers might be known).  Her composite impression was of flat thin voices which she could imagine in excitement becoming shrill; of curious appraising stares; of a vast amount of garrulous irrelevancy; of a note of injury that one who could profess so little equipment beyond good will should so disappoint the expectation her first appearance had aroused.  The background was a room—­it seemed to have been in every case the same—­expensively overfurnished, inexpressive, ill-fitting its uses, like a badly chosen ready-made coat.  The day was not without its humors, or what would have been humors if her spirit could have rebounded to them.  Chiefly, the violent antagonism she found aroused in two or three cases by the color of her hair.

The residuum of her pilgrimages was three addresses where she might call about the middle of next week, in person or by telephone, to learn the advertiser’s decision.  Well it would convince Wallace Hood that she was in earnest.  That was something.

Wallace’s coming to tea became, as the day wore on, more and more something to look forward to.  All the things about him which in more resilient hours she had found irritating or absurd, his neutrality, his appropriateness, his steady unimaginative way of going always one step at a time, seemed now precisely his greatest merits.  The thought of tea in his company even aroused a faint appetite for food in her and lent zest to her preparations for it.  When she stopped at the neighborhood caterer’s shop for supplies she bought some tea cakes in addition to the sandwiches she had ordered in the morning.  She had managed to get home in good enough season to restore the drawing-room somewhat to its inhabited appearance, to set out her tea table, put on her kettle, and then go up-stairs and change her dress for something that was not wilted by the day’s unusual heat.  She was ready then to present before Wallace an ensemble which should match pretty well her tone at the telephone this morning.