“No, I dare say not,” Mrs. Wappinger responded, sympathetically.  “Mr. Wappinger himself was just such a man as that.  He’d put through a deal that would make Wall Street shiver; but he understood my woman’s nature just about as much as old Tiger there, wagging his tail on the grass, follows the styles in bonnets.  Only, I’ll tell you what, Mrs. Eveleth:  it’s for men like that that God created sensible, capable wives, like you and me; and they ought to have ’em.”

This theme admitting of little discussion, Diane did not pursue it, but she went away from Waterwild with a deepened sense of Derek’s need of her, as well as of Dorothea’s.  She could so easily have helped them both that the enforced impotence was a new element in her pain.  To walk the town in search of work to which she was little suited, when that which no one but herself could accomplish had to remain undone, became, during the next few weeks, the most intolerable part of the irony of circumstance.  The wifely, the maternal qualities of her being, of which she had never been strongly conscious till of late, awoke in response to the need that drew them forth, only to be blighted by denial.

The inactivity was the harder to endure because of the fact that, as autumn passed into early winter, there came a period when all her little world seemed to have dropped her out of sight.  There were no more “off-days” at Waterwild, and Miss Lucilla’s occasional letters from Newport ceased.  Between her mother-in-law and herself, after a few painful attempts at intercourse, there had fallen an equally painful silence.  Even her two or three pupils fell away.

From the papers she learned that one or another of those for whom she cared was back in town again.  She walked in the chief thoroughfares in the hope of meeting some of them, but chance refused to favor her.  In the dusk of the early descending November and December twilights she passed their houses, watching the warm glow of the lights within, against which, now and then, a shadow that she could almost recognize would pass by.  She could have entered at Miss Lucilla’s door, or Mrs. Wappinger’s; but a strange shyness, the shyness of the unfortunate, had taken hold of her, and she held back.  In the mean time she was free to watch, with sad eyes and sadder spirit, the great city, reversing the processes of nature, awaken from the torpor of the genial months into its winter life.

No one knew better than herself that thrill of excited energy with which those born with the city instinct return from the acquired taste for mountain, seaside, and farm, to enter once more the maze of purely human relationships.  It was a moment with which her own active nature was in sympathy.  She liked to see the blinds being raised in the houses and the barricading doors taken down.  She liked to see the vehicles begin to crowd one another in the streets and the pedestrians on the pavement wear a brisker air.  She liked to see the shop-windows brighten