Dear [she wrote]: I know what you would say. You would say that it made no difference, and it would not now. But some day it would, it would grow upon us and smother us. It would be ‘my past,’ and the time would come when your pride might make you hate me, for I would hate myself. I can face this now. I don’t know whether I could face it later. I must go away and do something to absolve myself in my own eyes. And you must not interfere--you cannot. It will be years before I can see you again. I shall never forget these short days, too precious to describe. It is almost enough, that memory, without anything more. Good-bye. She could write no more, explain no more, though she wanted to. She suddenly reflected on the injustice of having to carry all the responsibility herself. She would have to repulse every advance, however much she might long to accept it. She laid down her pen--a gold one that matched the other little tools on her writing table--with a gesture that signified she was laying down everything else in the room, the thousand things she had used and loved, the horses, the trees, the long, dear roads, the very air of Thornhill. XV The only things she saw at first were as dreary and tragic as herself. It began the moment she left Thornhill, with her last vision of Ellen’s agonizing, tear-stained face hiding at her window on the circular drive. Then came the ride alone, through hot rows of dusty, dull brick houses; the terror-inspiring sight of lives straitened and stagnant through poverty; the abysmal reek of the neighbourhood, near a glue factory, where she left her car in the garage, with instructions to return it on the morrow, and engaged an express man to take her trunk; the long file of weary, hopeful people with little green bills in their hands at the bank--worshippers in the modern temple; the immigrants at Union Station, sprawling on the circular benches about the pillars, hemmed in by their squalid baggage and children; the herding of exhausted, stupid families from the country trains to the street-cars and from the street-cars to the trains; the smoke-patined inferno of the city sweating in the heat after the clean beauty of her home.... She had been unable to get away in time to buy a berth in the fast train. In order to leave that day, which was imperative, she was forced to take the “two-day” train, and tried to console herself with the thought that its second-rateness would more effectually cover her flight. But the endless trip in coaches that contained unprepossessing persons from the lower social chaos added to the weight that lay on her spirit.