Her maid was packing; Constance Palliser’s maid was also up to her chin in lingerie, and Constance hovered in the vicinity.  So there was no privacy there, and that was the reason Virginia evaded them, side-stepped Gussie Vetchen at the desk, eluded old Classon in the palm room, and fled like a ghost through the empty corridors as though the deuce were at her heels instead of in her heart.

The heart of Virginia was cutting up.  Alone in the corridors she furtively glanced at the letter, kissed the edge of the envelope, rolled and tucked it away in her glove, and continued her flight in search of solitude.

The vast hotel seemed lonely enough, but it evidently was too populous to suit Miss Suydam.  Yet few guests remained, and the larger caravansary was scheduled to close in another day or two, the residue population to be transferred to “The Breakers.”

The day was piping hot but magnificent; corridor, piazza, colonnade, and garden were empty of life, except for a listless negro servant dawdling here and there.  Virginia managed to find a wheel-chair under the colonnade and a fat black boy at the control to propel it; and with her letter hidden in her glove, and her heart racing, she seated herself, parasol tilted, chin in the air, and the chair rolled noiselessly away through the dazzling sunshine of the gardens.

On the beach some barelegged children were wading in the surf’s bubbling ebb, hunting for king-crabs; an old black mammy, wearing apron and scarlet turban, sat luxuriously in the burning sand watching her thin-legged charges, and cooking the “misery” out of her aged bones.  Virginia could see nobody else, except a distant swimmer beyond the raft, capped with a scarlet kerchief.  This was not solitude, but it must do.

So she dismissed her chair-boy and strolled out under the pier.  And, as nobody was there to interrupt her she sat down in the sand and opened her letter with fingers that seemed absurdly helpless and unsteady.

“On the train near Jupiter Light,” it was headed; and presently continued: 

“I am trying to be unselfishly honest with you to see how it feels.  First—­about my loving anybody.  I never have; I have on several occasions been prepared to bestow heart and hand—­been capable of doing it—­and something happened every time.  On one of these receptive occasions the thing that happened put me permanently out of business.  I’ll tell you about that later.

“What I want to say is that the reason I don’t love you is not because I can’t, but because I won’t!  You don’t understand that.  Let me try to explain.  I’ve always had the capacity for really loving some woman.  I was more or less lonely and shy as a child and had few playmates—­very few girls of my age.  I adored those I knew—­but—­well, I was not considered to be a very desirable playmate by those parents who knew the Malcourt history.

   “One family was nice to me—­some of them.  I usually cared a great
   deal for anybody who was nice to me.