"I think she did. That’s what made me think her touched in her mind or crazy. She said she hadn’t decided, or something like that; but as she was going to be an adventuress she had to begin some time, and perhaps it might as well be with him as with any one else. She spoke as if it rested entirely with her to take him or throw him away." Again I decided to be cruel. "It very likely does." She was standing now by my dressing-table, and as if my words had meant nothing to her she said: "Aren’t you going to take your hair-brush?" "Oh, I was forgetting to put it in. Thanks." When I went for it she was holding it in her hand. "What a queer, cheap-looking thing! Where on earth did you get it?" "I suppose it was at Tours, with the other things, when—" "Oh yes! I remember." She moved toward the door. "Your other brushes, the ebony ones with the silver initials, that I gave you before—before we were married, are here. They were with the things found on the bank of that— They forwarded them to me. Shouldn’t you—shouldn’t you like them?" "Thanks, no. This sort of common thing suits me better." I was doing the last things about the room. She was standing with her hand on the knob of the door, which was half open. "And when you’re back in New York, Billy, doing that kind of thing you talk about, shall you be all alone?" A second’s reflection convinced me that it was best to be clear about everything. "At first." "And later?" I pulled open a drawer from which I knew I had taken all the contents. "You mean when we’re both ... free?" "Suppose I put it ... when _you’re_ free?" "Oh, then there may be ... some one else." "Some one ... I know?" I delved into another drawer, hiding my face. "Some one you may have heard of; but I don’t—I don’t think you know her." When I had pushed in the drawer I raised myself; but I was alone in the room. Ten minutes later I had left the house without a good-by on either side. On the door-step, in my working-man’s costume, and with the everlasting bag and suit-case in my hands, I looked up at a starry, windy sky, with the trees of the Common tossing beneath it. "My God, what an end!" I cried, inwardly. But, as far as my knowledge or purpose went, an end it was. *CHAPTER II* Noble intentions being easier to conceive than to carry out, it is hardly surprising that on settling again in New York I found myself "let down." The sense of adventure was out of it, while that of the mission had crept in. The old friends were still the old friends; but if my intercourse with them was not less spontaneous it was certainly more self-conscious. Back in my squint-eyed room, with the new paper and the more showy set of fungi, the knowledge that I was there because I chose to be there, and not because I couldn’t help it, marked all my goings and comings with a point of interrogation.