It was really the beginning of her colossal solitude. She did not go away. She did not flee from the threats that sometimes came to her. She was sure of herself. She would not surrender. And she could wait. She effaced herself from the life of John Shadwell. And when the Town began putting two and two together, she was even forced to give up walking through the twilight in the direction of John Shadwell’s house, where from the opposite side of the street she could watch with a furtive eye the little girl who played on the lawn about the iron dogs and deer. She never went out except to buy the few things she needed to eat, and for her trade. It was about this time that a shop run by a Presbyterian elder refused to sell her a spool of thread with which to sew the bright roses on the hats of the ladies of the streets. She did not make a scene; she did not even complain. She went quietly from the shop and never again passed through its doors. But there were always the gay ladies. They came and went; but there were always some in the town, so it must have had some need for them. They could not live without money, yet they always had it, though they toiled not nor spun, to pay Vergie Winters for their hats. Some died; one or two were murdered in saloon brawls, but Vergie Winters never turned them away. They were her only friends. One wonders what secrets, what confidences they brought to Vergie Winters, sitting there in her narrow little house. One wonders what a dark history of the Town’s citizens went into the grave when Vergie Winters was carried down those narrow, rickety steps for the last time. But she said nothing. She simply waited. At last what she hoped--what she must have known--would happen, came to pass. One cold night while Vergie Winters sat sewing on the gay hats a key turned in the lock, and John Shadwell came back to her. He came in the face of scandal, of ruin, because he could not help himself. It had begun in a flash of lightning when Vergie Winters opened the door of her father’s house to let him in, and now John Shadwell found that it went on and on and on.... There was no stifling it. Who can picture that return? Who can imagine the sudden upleaping in the calm, withdrawn soul of Vergie Winters--who had such faith in this love that she sacrificed all her life to it? And so for years John Shadwell came, on the occasions when he was not in Washington, to see Vergie Winters in the narrow wooden house. She kept on with her precarious trade, for she would never while he lived accept any money from him. Besides, she could not, for his sake, afford to arouse suspicions. For herself it did not matter; she could not be worse off.