So he went back to the studio to lunch and to wait for her coming. Till she had ceased coming he hadn’t known how much the daily expectation of seeing her had meant to him. The very occasions on which she had, as he expressed it, played him false had brought an excitement which he would have been emotionally poorer for having missed. He could not go through the experience often; he could, perhaps, not go through it again. But for that test he was apparently not to be called upon. She was coming. She knew what she was coming for. The very fact that she had written meant surrender. And that, indeed, was what Jennie had been saying to herself all through the morning. Now that there had been this interval, she knew that her latitude for saying "Yes" and acting "No" was at an end. If she went at all, she must go all the way. To go once more and draw back once more would not be playing the game. She was clear in her mind that the day would be decisive. As to her decision, she was not so sure. That is, she was not sure of its wisdom, though sure what she would do. She would do what she had meant to do more than two months earlier. There was no reason why she shouldn’t, and the same set of reasons why she should. Not only were the money and release imperative, but Hubert meant more to her than ever. His sympathy through her sorrow had touched her by its very novelty. He had written, sent flowers, and kept himself in the background. Bob would have done more and moved her less, for the reason that doing all and giving all were in his nature. The rare thing being the most precious thing, she treasured the perfunctory phrases in Hubert’s scrawl of condolence above all the outpourings of Bob’s heart. Nevertheless, she treasured them with misgivings. The consciousness of being married had acquired some strength from watching the effect of her father’s death on her mother. She had known, ever since growing up, that her father and mother had been unequally mated. It was not wholly a question of practical failure or success—it was rather that the balance of moral support had been so shifted between them that the mother had nothing to sustain her. "Poor momma," had been Jennie’s way of putting it, "has to take the burden of everything. She’s got us on her shoulders, and poppa, too." And yet, with Josiah’s death, some prop of Lizzie’s inner life seemed to have been snatched away. She was not weaker, perhaps, but she was more detached, and stranger. To her children, to her neighbors, she had always been strange, always detached, but now the aloofness had become more significant. With Josiah alone she had lived in that communion of things shared which leads to understanding. Now that he was gone, something had gone with him, leaving Lizzie like an empty house.