Her life outside of the office was so devoid of romance that this brush with it at the soap company was not unpleasant. She had occupied more than one furnished room since the start at Mrs. McCabe’s, and in her wanderings she had come necessarily in contact with the Village life, but she did not adopt its easy associations. She discovered very early that the Village was the gossip shop of the country. National--and international--news travelled fast there from tongue to tongue, concerning people even slightly known or connected with the known. You could not say when you would walk into one of its restaurants and find at the next table a prominent matron of your city. A half a dozen times she had dodged or stared down old acquaintances on the upper Avenue. There were girls she met from day to day, willing to become her friends--attractive girls who were doing interesting things. A few good cronies of this sort would have lightened her solitary evenings and perhaps helped her to find work more congenial than business. But friendships, to be worth while, had to be frank. She knew she would be tempted defiantly to tell all about herself, and she shrank from doing so. Native resourcefulness made it easy to draw the line of separation, but pride made it hard. She realized that her aloofness was causing criticism. In the two restaurants where she took most of her evening meals--because they were cheap and clean--the talk was not sympathetic. If one was free to have lovers _ad lib._ in the Village one was obviously not free to dispense with friends entirely. She seemed a snob. There were times when she gave herself up to storms of grief. It grew to be an act of self-preservation, a part of her philosophy of endurance. Long spells of weeping, or of a weary, helpless state of the spirit that was more thoroughly a surrender and resignation than tears. Again and again she would cry through the darkness for Hal with the plaintive voice of a sick child--and even for the kind ghost of Mathilda Seymour. If she felt ashamed of these indulgences, she argued that there could be no harm in them. Her old friends could not hear her. She was alone in all those little rooms, completely cut off from anything familiar, from all but the fluttering, unreal, poignant memories of her beautiful childhood. Waves of passionate self-pity swept over her; she rebelled aloud against the bitter meanness of her betrayal; the awful burden of carrying her secret alone.