She paused, looking impatiently at her listener, who was so silent.
"Don't you understand?" she said. "I'm no more Mrs. John Barnabas Hill than you are. If you're wise you'll make him marry you to-morrow."
Susan did not know which way to turn when she was in the street. It seemed much darker; it seemed as if she were lost.
She walked blindly on and on. The people were ghosts that were streaming by; their faces that gleamed and passed did not lighten her terrible loneliness. A straw in that human river, she was afraid.
There was a post-office on the other side of the street. She almost ran to it, unconscious of the swift perils of the crossing.
For she must write to Barnaby, and the thought of communicating with him, poignant as it was, had a strange touch of comfort. The bare office became a harbour.
They gave her a letter card, and she wrote at the counter, with the scratching office pen. That was why it was so ill written. It was ridiculous how such a trifle hurt her. Was it not the first and last time she would ever write to him, and did it matter how badly, since it was to tell him that there was no bar between him and Julia? ...
She held it fast an instant before letting it fall into the yawning slit. She liked holding it in her hand, because it was a link between her and all that lay behind that curtain of loneliness; because it was going to him. In a little while he would touch it, would wonder, perhaps, at the unknown hand, hat poor scribble--! She dropped it in and it went like her own life into the dark.
For awhile she hurried, fighting her choking terror of the emptiness that was left. Why was it worse now than it used to be? She had been in strange cities, she had been friendless.... And somewhere behind in the glitter that mocked the darkness there was still one person who would help her, if she asked help; who would be kind to her lavishly, without understanding. She did not ask herself why it was impossible to turn in her rudderless flight and appeal to the woman from whom she had tried to guard her heart. There was a gulf between her and Adelaide. Little by little the fear driving her seemed to fail, and all other emotions grew indistinct, crushed by an infinite weight of fatigue. At last she could not think, could not suffer. She only wanted to go to sleep.