The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

THISTLEDOWN

I.

The dandelion seed, when it blows, does not know where it is going: it will cross miles of meadow, sail over forests of pine, travel down mountain gorges, be caught for a day in a cobweb, and at last find its growing place in the least likely of spots. It will perhaps try to grow in an old shoe, or an empty tomato tin, or a crack in a wall. And, of course, it will have no memory of the poor plant, leagues away, from which it set out on its journey. There is a kind of pathos in this, and something beautiful also. And it is with just such an image that I always think of Coralyn, that gallantest of creatures, when I try to tell her story. There is, to be quite truthful, no story—at best, only the materials for a story. Life seldom arranges itself in an obvious pattern. It may surprise us—and often does—or it may shock us, or turn swiftly from melodrama to comedy, or from the humdrum to tragedy; but how few lives do we know in which there is any perceptible “form,” any design of the sort that novelists employ! Coralyn’s story is at best a chronicle—hardly even that. It is a series of episodes, an uneven progress in time; it is as aimless as the voyage of the dandelion thistle, and almost as purposeless. And as I look back on it, with its span of five or six years, I even wonder, sometimes, whether Coralyn, any more than the thistledown, remembered where she had come from, or knew where she was going. This is an exaggeration, of course—that she did, now and then, remember, was attested by those strange despairs into which now and then she would suddenly pass. Abruptly, she would drop her gayety, her frivolity, her tomboyish violences and absurdities, and be plunged into a half-hour of despair and weeping with which I never in the least knew how to deal. Did she, at such moments, remember and foresee? Did she have some sudden foreknowledge of doom? She would never tell me. All that she would say to me, when I tried to comfort her, was the phrase (which always struck terror to my heart), “I’m afraid! I’m afraid.”

What was it that she was afraid of? Was it life itself, perhaps? Not, certainly, in any obviouse sense. She was a brave girl, clear-eyed, clear-headed, straightforward (with some exceptions), and I never knew anyone who so consistently, even recklessly, took life with both hands. It may have been this, indeed, that she was afraid of; she may have guessed, sooner than we did, and more accurately, the dark forces that were at work in her and to what end they would bring her at last. For there was little or no self-deception in Coralyn. If now and then she flinched a little from telling us, or telling me, the truth about herself, I am sure she never flinched from facing the truth where it most, after all, matters—in her conscience and consciousness. When she had occasion to be dishonest, she knew it.

One of the earliest instances of this was at the very beginning. She had come to act as secretary to my wife, who was an authoress; Mabel had found her through a local employment agency. What Coralyn was doing in New Haven, where we then lived, we couldn’t make out. She was vague about this, only telling us that she was a graduate of a Western university, that she came of an old Virginia family, that her relatives were, with one exception (a cousin), dead, and that she had come East simply because of a conviction that there were more opportunities, of a mildly literary sort, in New England. Heaven knows where she had got this idea, or why she should, of all places, have picked out New Haven. Possibly the presence of the university had something to do with it—I seem to remember that this is what we thought at the time. Anyway, we both liked her and believed her. She was charming, gentle, quiet, refined, never obtrusive, delightful to look at without being exactly pretty, and extremely intelligent. She was then, I think, about twenty-two. One had only to see her for a moment to realize that she was by no means the ordinary sort of secretary. She was always quite beautifully dressed, but without any flashiness, and struck me as singularly uncorrupted by those minor vulgarities of the moment which so many of her generation regarded as the sign manual of sophistication. If she rouged, one didn’t guess it. In fact, the most pronounced impression she made, with her candid forehead and gray eyes and straight carriage, and a kind of touching simplicity of speech, was of an almost frightening unworldiness and innocence. I know now, of course, that this appearance was by no means entirely true—or true, at any rate, only to the role for which she had cast herself. And isn’t this a very essential kind of truth? She was escaping from something of which, for various not very good reasons, she was ashamed; and she was molding herself, or trying to, very courageously, according to an ideal.

About all this she was, I am sure, quite explicit with herself. I imagine she said to herself: “Now Coralyn, you little fool, here is your chance! Let’s have no sentimental nonsense about it. It won’t help the Wassons to know things about you that they needn’t know. It won’t help you either. For the love of Pete, keep your mouth shut, be a lady, be refined, or learn to be, and take one clear step upward or forward to the sort of life you want to lead. Onward to literature and New York and, maybe, a good marriage!… And anyway there’ll be good ‘contacts.’”… And she played her part to perfection. Mabel—poor soul—always said she was the best secretary she ever had. Not only in the mere drudgery, either—for by degrees, as the two women came to know and like each other, Coralyn was more and more called upon to act also in a critical capacity. I myself was never much use at this. My wife was a writer of best-sellers—historical romances and such—and my own tastes simply didn’t happen to run in that direction; my passion for Trollope was Mabel’s despair. But Coralyn, as by degrees she came out of her shell, or was invited out of it by Mabel, and as she was more and more permitted to step out of her position as employee and assume that of friend, became, as Mabel used often to say, invaluable. She was an excellent judge of “what the public wants,” and with this, also, she was an uncommonly keen judge of detail, and of matters of style. When I came home from the office at the end of the day, as that first winter passed, it was increasingly often that I found Coralyn still in the drawing room with Mabel, discussing the latest novel over a cup of tea or a cocktail. From this, it was by the easiest of transitions that she became Mabel’s most intimate friend; in so far as poor Mabel, who never had much genius for friendship, could be said to have an intimate friend. Coralyn was kept not only for tea, but for dinner. She was kept not only for dinner, but overnight. She stayed with us for week-ends, she sometimes ran the house for us when we went to New York, she filled in at bridge, she helped with the preparations for parties, and, in short, she ended by becoming, before many months were over, practically a member of the household. Which, as I see now, was exactly what she was after.

And this brings me to the first point, in the story, at which I myself became at all intimately involved with Coralyn; I will try to tell it as simply as possible. From the outset, I had been fearfully attracted to her. So much so, I recall, that at first I was almost studiously rude to her, out of a sort of instinctive fear. At the time, Mabel and I had been married ten years. We had no children, we had separate interests, and while we were as fond of each other as the average married pair, nevertheless we were no longer, naturally, wildly in love. Just the same I was, as I always was, extraordinarily fond of Mabel, had the very highest admiration for her, and wouldn’t have hurt her for worlds. Nor had I ever had any great desire for extra-conjugal adventures, or to be any kind of Don Juan. All this came into my mind when Coralyn appeared; we had no sooner looked at each other than I experienced a dread. I knew that I attracted her; I knew that if I let her guess that I too was attracted there would be trouble; I wanted to see her, but also I wanted to avoid trouble, and to avoid hurting Mabel. Consequently, while I took great pains to tell Mabel that I thought Coralyn an admirable person, I was, as I say, very often deliberately rude to Coralyn herself. I made a point, from time to time, of quite obviously avoiding her. On several occasions when it happened that we were left alone in the house together I made palpably lying excuses and left her; I could see that she was distressed. If she tried to draw me into conversation à deux, I would answer her monosyllabically, or retreat to my study for a pretense of work; there to smoke cigarettes one after another and to wonder what would happen.… I might have guessed.

For it is plain enough now that my tactics were precisely the worst in the world. What could have been better calculated to attract the girl than this studied unapproachableness, this air of remoteness and superiority? Particularly when one recalls that she herself was drawn to me from the beginning, and also that she was at that very time struggling almost obsessedly to get away from her own sense of inferiority and obscurity. The result was that I became for her a symbol; I was the obstacle itself: for the time being, the goal itself; I was something to be overcome. I doubt whether she phrased this explicitly, or separated out the various elements of which the complex was composed. She only knew, instinctively, that she was there, in that queer house, simply to be near me, and in the hope of getting nearer still. Much later, years later, she told me that she had from the outset thought me the nicest man she had ever met, and the wisest—adding, to soften the blow, that she had also always thought me something of a fool. She didn’t exactly want to fall in love with me—what she wanted was to learn from me, to make me a kind of father, or even (I don’t know at which stage she thought of this) a father-lover. But the motive anyway was a desire for knowledge; she simply thought I could help her.… I often wonder whether I ever did.

II.

Certainly not at the first climax of our little affair, our absurd little affair. There was never anything more grotesque, more delicious, more ridiculous, more lovely, more pathetically or beautifully a failure. It was early in the spring that it came about. Suddenly, one day, my wife was invited by wire to give a lecture in Baltimore as substitute for another lecturer who had failed to appear. As it happened, we had just lost our two maids; a comic interlude into which I won’t digress. Mabel was in a panic. Who was to look after things—the dog, the cat, the canary, not to mention poor Philip, her husband? It was then that Coralyn stepped forward; this was her cue for effective—oh, very effective—entrance. This was the chance for which she had been waiting, and for which she and I, for months past—she consciously and I unconsciously—had been elaborately preparing. It was not for nothing now that we had had so little to do with each other, had spoken together so little, had appeared even to avoid each other. More than once Mabel had reproached me for my indifference to Coralyn. She had, therefore, not an atom of a suspicion that she was about to be betrayed. She accepted Coralyn’s offer with joy, took the first train out of New Haven, to be gone for three nights, and there, heaven help us, we were.

What happened was inevitable; if only because we had resisted it so long. We came together as naturally as leaf touches leaf or the grass bends to the wind. As soon as we sat down together at the dinner table, and looked at each other across the candles, we both knew it; our talk became a mere subterfuge; and when afterwards we went out to the garden, where it was growing dark, and she put out her hand to touch a lilac bud, it was really to me she put out her hand, and I took it. When I kissed her, she laughed into my mouth, and turned her face away, and then turned it back again. After that, everything was madness.

And the next day it was madder still, but in a different way. For the first time I knew Coralyn as she really was—a hoyden, a tomboy, the very wildest of creatures; her mouse-like demureness had merely been a surface. She assured me she was not in love with me—why should she be? She laughed at me for being a sentimental fool—I told her that I, for my part, was falling in love with her; which indeed I was. I sat on a tree stump in the garden, while she smoked a cigarette. I felt very wretched.

“You’ll get over it, nice old Philip”—she ruffled my hair—“You ought to know better. Why drag in feelings and things? I was in love once myself, or thought I was, but now I think it’s all the ‘bunk.’ You know what that means? Or are you too old-fashioned in New Haven.”

“You’re a demon, Coralyn.”

“I’m a changeling. I have no heart.”

“Some day you’ll find it—maybe too late.”

“Oh, don’t for God’s sake be sententious.… All the same I’m afraid! I’m afraid.…”

“What of?”

“Oh, ask me another. I don’t know. I wish I did. Where do we go from here?”

It was then that she told me about Michael, her sweetheart. She had been engaged to him for two years. He was an ensign in the Navy. Finally she had decided that she really wasn’t in love with him at all.

“But I thought I’d give the poor kid a square deal,” she said, looking at me soberly, “so I came to Newport to meet him and tell him about it. I spent a week with him—just, you know—to make it easier for him.”

“You mean you lived with him?”

“Sure. Why not?… Which is why you found me in New Haven.”

“What about Michael.”

She shrugged her young shoulders, arched her eyebrows, made a light gesture as of dusting some infinitesimal object off her fingers.

“He was nice.… But why should we get married and ruin each other?… Oh, no! Oh, no! I’d outgrown him. Outclimbed him. And that was that.”

“Well, well.”

“Well, well … let’s go for a ride.”

We rode, we walked, we dined, we danced, we dropped in at a show of paintings (where I kissed her in a deserted room before a brilliant water-color by Dodge MacKnight), and all the while we talked feverishly, jokingly, uneasily, in a kind of attempt to find just what our odd relationship was going to be. She was very detached, very cynical, very passionate, but also very remote. I was—I am ashamed to say—eager; it was my first transgression, and I hoped it would be prolonged.

Coralyn made fun of me.

“Don’t look at me like that when we’re dancing. The cops’ll pinch you.”

“They’ll think we’re engaged.”

“They’ll think you’re my sugar daddy!… I love this thing—what is this thing?”

And then there was Mabel. Would she mind, would she guess? Would she mind very much if she did guess?

“But there won’t,” said Coralyn, gently, murmuringly, “be very much to mind, will there?”

And as a matter of fact, there wasn’t; Coralyn saw to that. She farced the whole thing. Divinely passionate one moment, she was a clown the next. If I may put it in the vernacular, she deliberately set out to raise hell with anything that might threaten to become a “grand passion.” And she was singularly successful. In twenty-four hours she had, as she herself put it, spanked it out of me. I accused her of being heartless—I accused her of being everything. I was angry, I threatened her with a dire future, a future without home, without friends, without love—she laughed and threw a slipper at me. She told me that I ought to have been a Shakspearean actor. She suggested that my eyebrows ought to have been purple, that I needed a beard (at which point she imitated quite admirably the bleat of a goat), and then, abruptly kissing me, she said that she liked me best when I was slightly tight. (She had seen me tight just once.) I was not only defenseless—I actually found myself liking this new Coralyn, and this new friendship, better than the old.… By the time that Mabel came back, our new terms had been so well formulated that Mabel saw or suspected nothing. Our three lives went on just as before, until, some while later, Coralyn suddenly announced that she had a chance for a job in New York. She went, and for three months we heard not a word from her.

III.

What we then heard was the somewhat surprising news that Coralyn had gone into business for herself—she had opened a literary agency in partnership with a young Frenchman, a Greenwich Village Frenchman, named something-or-other Rivière. She solicited my wife’s business, and Mabel politely refused, but asked her down for a week-end. To this Coralyn replied that she was too busy, but suggested that if we should happen to be in New York we should look her up; she had an apartment (as I recall it) in East 35th Street. As it happened, I was planning at that very moment to go to New York on business; and when, two weeks later, I took the train, I wired Coralyn to meet me, if she could, for lunch. I don’t know quite what I expected would occur; but I do know that I thought our little affair would have a kind of recrudescence—as indeed, in a way, it did. When we met, amid the marble columns of the Hotel Belmont lobby, and sat down together on a gilt and red-plush sofa, I came under her spell as sharply and deliciously as before; and she too (as she told me later) felt not only a revival of her feeling for me, but a deepening also. As a matter of fact, it was at this moment that she began to make a sort of father of me, or father-confessor; though other feelings were mixed with this as well. As for me, I was again in love with her, but in a very curious and unanalyzable way. Did I feel sorry for her? Perhaps. At any rate, I noticed at the very outset a change in her, and one that disturbed me, made me a little unhappy. She was prettier, maturer, gentler, softer—but also—could I be mistaken?—in some indefinable way cheaper. Greenwich Village, or New York, had already left its mark on her.

“You’ve got on too much lipstick,” I said.

“And observe the eyebrows—I’ve plucked them out.”

“So I see. The exquisite eyebrows of the night-moth.”

“And admire the snakeskin shoes, for God’s sake! Aren’t they the bee’s moccasins?” She flourished a foot at me, a very smart foot, and prodded my ankle with her toe, laughing.

I admired her shoes, her frock, her hat, her gloves, taking the opportunity to pinch her little finger; and at once the same sort of delirium came over us that had so suddenly overwhelmed us at New Haven. But with a difference. For while we continued our light banter, at lunch, over a bad bottle of wine, I was continually aware, beneath it, of a deep melancholy, a note as of desperateness, even of tragedy. She was, I felt sure, unhappy, or bewildered—she made one think of a lost child. Even when she laughed—which as always she did a good deal—I seemed to detect an evasiveness in her, a fugitiveness, a flight from something; her eyes would explore mine and waver away; she would make a joke, only the next instant to catch her breath as if in tension. Her agency, she said, was flourishing. Her partner was a charmer—she had met him at a party.

“Are you in love with him?”

“Oh, no! You know my notions about love. It’s a fake.”

“But you are in love with somebody. I can see it.”

“Have I got red wings on? Are my eyes like stars? Philip, you’re a scream. Where’s your purple beard?”

“I shaved it off. But you’re unhappy.”

“No. But I’m afraid!… Let’s get a taxi.”

Her apartment, it turned out, was sublet from Rivière, who had “taken a room in the Village.” Some of his things were still about—a raincoat, a couple of hats, a pipe rack hung with dirty pipes, a violin case. She waved a hand at them.

“He’s coming to get them—some day. Would you like to meet him?”

“No. Why should I?”

“I’d like to know what you think of him. He wants to marry me.”

“The devil he does!”

“But I don’t think—oh, I don’t know.”

I put my arms around her—she rested her hands on my breast and kissed me, at first lightly, quickly, repeatedly, laughing a little, and then, all of a sudden, with an extraordinary ecstasy of surrender, murmuring softly into my mouth as she did so.

“You’re nice, Philip.”

“So are you, Coralyn. But you’re unhappy.”

“Yes.”

“Tell me why.”

“I will—but not now.”

“Tell me.”

“Don’t be a nuisance.”

She drew back from me, laughing, her hands still on my breast, and I saw that tears were in her eyes.

“I’ll tell you at breakfast,” she said, “and in the meantime, for God’s sake, let’s be happy!”

And we were, with such happiness, such ecstasy—perhaps the sharper for that—as can come to two people who know, every moment, beneath, around, above their happiness, the shadow of tragedy. Perhaps the sense of time, the sense of doom, played into our hands. At all events, everything conspired to make that twenty-four hours the happiest we ever knew together. It rained, and we walked in the rain all the way to the museum, where we scandalized the other visitors (who were very few) by making an absurdity of everything. Coralyn was at her best; at her best and most tomboyish and most ridiculous. The Turners reminded her of dishes on which poached eggs and strawberry jam had been successively eaten; she whinnied before the El Grecos; and the Rodin sculptures, she pretended, made her sick, reminding her of the “sort of pale underdeveloped over-involved things you see in bottles in a medical school.” She kissed me behind the model of the Parthenon, before Manet’s parrot portrait, in the presence of a mummy, and—what was worse—in the presence also of a very solemn museum attendant, who had come unexpectedly from behind the plaster horse. She declared that I had gray hair, and that she was a disgrace to me; taking my handkerchief out of my pocket, as she said so, to blow her nose.

“You’re an old fogey, Philip.”

“I know it.”

“You’re a darling, Philip.”

“Of course.”

“I think you ought to wear sideburns and a stock, and carry a gray umbrella.”

“Why not a bird-cage?”

“Or an organ and a monkey. Let me be your monkey, Philip.”

And at once she imitated, startlingly, a monkey, grinning rabidly and searching for fleas under her armpits. She was perfectly hideous; dowagers and art students stared; and I adored her, at the same time leading her quickly into another gallery.

After that we walked in the Park in the rain, admired the wet riders on their wet horses, admired the reservoir, the camels, the ducks and swans (I told her about the Italian immigrant, newly arrived, who though they were wild, and shot a brace for his supper), and proceeded down Sixth Avenue (my favorite street) to a French table d’hôte dinner. Everything was as delightful as could be. We dawdled over the bad cocktails, we dawdled again over the cognac and coffee, amused ourselves with the conversations at the adjacent tables, all the while with a feeling that we were avoiding the issue. Coralyn was gay; she told me about the wild parties she had been to, in the Village, and of the freaks she had met. Epicenes of both sexes. Professional Bohemians, careful cultivators of the attic and the coal-hole. She assured me that I wouldn’t at all like the sort of thing; I agreed with her. Once at a dance a well-known novelist had bitten her on the shoulder, just before he passed out in the middle of the floor. So-and-so, the publisher, had insisted on seeing her home—very affectionately—and had been sick in the cab. She had made a friend of a policeman, who had introduced her to a new speakeasy—a very nice one. She had gone with him there several times. And so on and so on.…

I might have guessed what was coming, of course, but I didn’t; and in consequence, as I see now, I made things all the harder for her. What she wanted was sympathy, understanding, guidance; what I gave her, unwittingly, late that night, was a rather nasty little lecture. I had had a few drinks too many, and her unshakable flippancy had ended by irritating me. I told her once again that she had no soul, no heart, would be lost; and while I did indeed say these things without anger, I nevertheless said them seriously, and said them (what was worse) between kisses. How intolerably that must have hurt her! And what a fool she must have thought me. That she took it admirably is, in the circumstances, the highest praise I could give her. She merely covered my mouth with her hand, and said, “Wait,” and then, with a curious air of abstraction and gentleness, ran her fingers through my hair, stopped the gesture as soon as it had begun, laughed, and fell asleep.

And at breakfast it all came out.

“Now,” she said, “holding up this nice red apple in the healthy morning sunlight, and preparing to bite it, I’ll tell you. I’ve been bad.”

“Bad?”

“Bad! Very bad. New Haven wouldn’t have any idea.”

“You wouldn’t kid me, would you?”

“I’ve had six affairs since I saw you last. And they’ve been a perfect scream.”

“Coralyn!”

“Oh, don’t for God’s sake look pious! Have a prune.”

“I don’t like prunes. They look so senile.”

“So do you.”

“Well, tell me about it. I don’t know whether to say I’m sorry or glad.”

“Why be either? Ain’t nature grand? I’ve had a good time.”

“No, I don’t think you have. I suppose Rivière is one of them!”

“Of course—don’t be an ass. So was the policeman. So was the novelist. So was the publisher.”

“Coralyn, you’re a damned fool.”

“Don’t I know it? But I wanted to hear you say it.”

She smiled across the small bare table at me, and as she smiled her eyes suddenly brightened with tears. Unblinking, still smiling, she let the tears fall. And without the slightest change in her voice she said:

“I’m afraid, Philip! I’m afraid. I really am.”

We talked about it all morning. She said she couldn’t understand it—it had just happened. She had been bored, lonely, wanted excitement, needed to feel that men were attracted to her, liked the attentions of men, especially literary men. As for the policeman—well, that was just a mad and slightly drunken experiment. What harm was there in it? She didn’t regret it at all.

I began to feel slightly sick about the whole thing, and found myself replying to her in arid monosyllables. Then I was ashamed. I told her frankly that all this had somewhat changed my feelings about her; she smiled, and said she was sure it had. Then, assuring her repeatedly that I had no real moral objections to what she was doing, I begged her to believe, as I believed, that such a way of living would bring her to ruin. She would become spiritually bankrupt. The whole thing would become meaningless. She wasn’t sure—she quarreled with me about the word spiritual. What was spiritual? I found, not unnaturally, that I wasn’t any too sure of its meaning myself; so I shifted to more material grounds. What of her life, viewed as a whole? Suppose she wanted, later, to marry, etc., etc., and the man she wanted to marry.…

“Yes, darling Philip, you’re so good but I know all that. That’s in the first grade, you learn it when you learn genders and conjugations.”

“So you do. But you learn other truths as well; and truth is truth.”

“And west is left and east is right, and never the twain shall meet.”

“Good Lord, Coralyn, you’re hopeless. What’s the use of talking to you?”

“None, I fear. I’ve simply got to go through with it. Ain’t it awful?”

“No—it really isn’t. Don’t, whatever you think, think that!” (This was my one feeble moment of magnanimity.) “It will come out all right. But for heaven’s sake don’t be in such a rush to seize life with both hands—! You’ll get them both burnt.”

“I burned both hands before the fire of life: let that be on my little headstone.”

More and more, as we bantered in this fashion, I had a feeling of entire helplessness. What on earth could I do? My time was growing short—I knew I must leave her at twelve, not to see her again for months—and this only added to my misery. What was going to happen to her now? She liked me, she liked to think that I respected, or even loved her; and now I had unmistakably given her the impression that I no longer did either. I walked up and down her shabby little sitting room, looking now and then angrily at Rivière’s pipes and coats and things (what sort of chap was he, anyway?) and tried vainly to formulate some sort of plan. The only thing I could think of was to urge her to marry. But why, she countered, if it was her nature, as it seemed to be, to be frivolous, should she marry? For in that case she would make not one, but two, people unhappy. She hadn’t yet encountered a man with whom she would want to live for more than a week. She thought men as a race were detestable, conceited, boring creatures, interesting only because they were so naively and disingenuously unscrupulous.

What answer was there to this? None. I looked at my watch, and glared at Coralyn, and packed my things, frowning, and all she did was to offer me from time to time a marshmallow or an apple or a little present for Mabel. A present for Mabel! A singular moment for that, as Coralyn, confound her, damned well knew. And nevertheless, here was this extraordinary thing between us, this deep understanding which not even petulant badinage could effectually conceal. We were both of us unhappy, and we parted unhappy, and the only assurance I extracted from Coralyn was that she would really, and quite soon, come down to New Haven for a week-end.… Even to this, however, she added that she would probably bring a young man, a prospective bridegroom, for my “august inspection and approval.”… And, laughing once more, she shut the door between us.

IV.

As it turned out, it wasn’t merely months before I saw Coralyn again—it was a year and a half. I wrote to her twice and got no answer. (I suggested that she reply to me at my office.) About seven months after the New York episode, a postcard came from Paris, addressed in her handwriting, with nothing on it but the word “So!”, a cryptic utterance which I confess I never fathomed. What on earth did she mean by it? Mabel and I turned it over and over (it was a picture of the Eiffel Tower!) but came to no conclusion. Perhaps her business had taken her abroad? I thought of her French partner, and said nothing. Perhaps she was married? A holiday merely? In which case she was, of course, prosperous.…

All of which was to be solved for me when she did, eventually, turn up, but only after (and only very shortly after) another odd little episode had befallen me.

It began with a telephone call. A male voice asked me if I could dine with him—he was an old friend of Coralyn. He didn’t want to see me in the office, in office hours—it was rather a private and delicate business—did I mind? My curiosity was aroused and I made an appointment for dinner with him.

It was Michael, of course. A nice chap, simple, straightforward, fair-haired and blue-eyed—and by this time a full-fledged lieutenant. I liked him immediately, and I think he liked me. I told him I had heard a good deal about him from Coralyn; he blushed. He then apologized, somewhat hesitantly, for intruding on me in this fashion, but, as he said, he got the impression from Coralyn that I cared a good deal for her, and as he did himself, always had and always would, he had thought he would like to talk to me.

What ensued was extraordinary. We both put our cards on the table, quite without jealousy, and in an entire unanimity of devotion to Coralyn. He had guessed that Coralyn had had an affair with me—though, as he added, he knew Coralyn well enough to know there was nothing so remarkable in that. (An observation which a little disconcerted me.) He spoke very gently and slowly—in a quiet low-pitched voice, looking at me shyly and steadily—and I couldn’t help feeling all the while that he was the man that Coralyn should have stuck to. Why hadn’t she? Not enough imagination in him? A little too Western? too young?… I couldn’t imagine, and meanwhile he was telling me that in the last analysis it was because he felt sure I loved Coralyn (as who couldn’t) that he had come to me. I assured him that I did indeed love her—that she was a very charming and very talented girl. And then, after a pause, he suddenly asked me if I knew that she was going to the devil.

After that, the deluge. He had known a great deal more about it than I did—not because she had seen him, or permitted him to come to her, but simply because, in a sort of dog-like spirit of devotion, he had made it his business to keep watch on her. I don’t know yet how he did it, but he did. Detectives, perhaps? I don’t suppose he could have afforded it; nor do I believe he would have stooped to it. At all events, he knew. He had the names at his fingers’ ends: all the Toms, Dicks and Harrys. All the addresses at which she had lived—and they were many. The jobs she had had—ditto. One after another. The literary agency had been a fiasco from the first, not a red cent in it, only a bluff, and Rivière all the time supporting her. (With a pang I recognized that at the time I had almost divined this.) The lampshade shop—did I know about the lampshade shop? Well, the lampshade shop (Christ! he said) had been endowed, pro tem, by some blankety-blank fairy of a newspaper art-critic. He had met him once at a party in Washington Square, and had with difficulty refrained from beating him up. He carried a gold-headed cane and had a purple handkerchief sticking out of his pocket. Did I know what he meant? I knew what he meant. Then there was the publisher, and the Socialist Messiah.…

We groaned together, we had several drinks together, we played pool; but what, I asked him, could we do about it? And he had no solution to offer, nor had I. He went on to tell me about her past. About this it turned out that she had, to put it mildly, prevaricated. She was not a graduate of a Western university—she had had one year at a small commercial college in St. Louis. Nor did she come of an old Virginia family—far from it. In fact, her people were perilously close (so he said) to what is called in the South “poor white trash.” Moreover, her mother was still alive, very much and very dreadfully alive; she was, Michael said, chalking his cue, a terrible woman: vulgar, whining, aggressive, spiteful, and altogether a thorn in poor Coralyn’s side. Coralyn had been good to her—had sent her money faithfully (she lived in South Carolina) on condition that she left Coralyn alone to make her own career without interference. No wonder Coralyn had pretended her relatives were dead; there was nothing, said Michael, which she so much dreaded as that some day her mother would turn up in the North and try to attach herself. She had continually threatened to do so. And if I had ever seen the object!… Christ, what a woman.

In the light of which, when Mabel and I discussed it later that night, we decided that we liked Coralyn more than ever. A typical case of a gallant creature trying to pull herself out of the mud by the roots, and on the whole succeeding. Who wouldn’t, in the circumstances, have lied a little? Who wouldn’t have tried to build a romance, given such a background, or, what was gallanter still, tried to live up to it? And the quite extraordinary refinement and subtlety and wit which Coralyn, with no upbringing to speak of, had achieved! As for her sense of values, moral values—naturally I didn’t go into that with Mabel, and Mabel knew nothing about it. I said not a word to her about Michael’s report that she was “going to the devil”; I merely put it that he was worried because she seemed to have dropped him.…

And Mabel, poor soul, being a romantic herself, and having into the bargain a novelist’s imagination (of a sort), was at once deeply stirred and wrote Coralyn a long sympathetic letter. It was this that brought about Coralyn’s final visit to New Haven. An answer came from her, as usual from a new address in New York (whereupon I wondered ‘Who is it now?’), and a few weeks later Coralyn herself appeared.

But not alone. Just as she had threatened, she brought along with her a young hopeful; apologized for him gayly and breathlessly, saying that she had been simply unable—did we mind?—to get rid of him; and that if we wanted to we could just send him back to Bank Street, where he belonged. The young man, whose name was Pope, effeminate, long-haired, pallidly sensuous and dissipated-looking, stood by with offensive assurance while she said all this, and obviously had no intention of going anywhere; just as obviously too, had been instructed by Coralyn to stick it out. He stuck it out, we had to ask him to stay, and stay he did. He was by way of being a budding novelist, whose bud has since, thank God, been nipped; and immediately he was all professional attention to Mabel, with an air of patronage which infuriated me. Mabel didn’t see through it at all.

As for Coralyn, she had begun to lose her looks. She was thinner, her face was older, she was quite shamelessly made up, she was expensively and a little too brilliantly dressed, but as amusing as ever. Just the same, I was annoyed by the whole proceeding, and didn’t attempt to conceal it from her. During the afternoon and dinner I said hardly a word to her, contriving (exactly as I used to do in the very first stages of our acquaintance) to keep out of her way on one or another thin pretext, and, of course, with a quite conscious and deliberate intention of hurting her. I succeeded. I even made a point, at dinner, of addressing all my remarks, much as I disliked doing so, to the young worm opposite me; and I did so, moreover, with an undisguised undercurrent of sarcasm.

The result of this was very painful, and I’m now ashamed of the whole episode, extremely so. For—a little after dinner—while Mabel and the worm were discussing the form of the novel in the garden, with the highest of high seriousness, their uplifted voices floating in through the open window mixed with the scent of sun-warmed phlox, Coralyn came quietly into my study. Her face was somber, soft, hurt—I had seen that expression before, and it always moved me. All the same, I was stubborn, and made no move to speak, merely looking at her with a hard detachment—as if, perhaps, she were merely a servant girl who had come to make an apology. She stood at a little distance from me, with her hands rather pathetically at her sides.

“Why are you so mean to me, Philip?” she said.

“You know perfectly well why.”

“Because I brought Hugh down?”

“Of course. You ought to have asked us.”

“There wasn’t time. And I thought you wouldn’t mind. If it was too casual, I’m sorry.”

“Of course, it was too casual. You can’t ignore people for two years and then do this sort of thing.… You know that as well as I do.”

There was a pause, she didn’t move, and then she said—

“It’s really because you don’t like him.”

“My dear Coralyn—”

“Oh, for God’s sake, don’t say ‘my dear Coralyn’ like that—my darling Philip!”

She tried to smile at me; but I was still hard.

“I don’t think it was very good manners, Coralyn.”

“I know it wasn’t. I’ve said I’m sorry. And I know in general, too, Philip, that you think I’m a disgrace and a scalawag—as I am. But for the love of Pete”—and her voice broke—“is life all manners? I thought we liked each other.”

I went to the window and closed it. Mabel and the worm were at the far end of the garden.

“I know that.”

“Well, then, for God’s sake be human!”

“I’m all too human. I think it was outrageous, and I think your young—I think he’s revolting.”

She turned, at that, suddenly away from me, and I knew she was crying—crying, as she always did, with just the fall of a tear or two, and no sound. She removed the tears with a quick fingertip, and then turned back again to face me as calmly as before.

“Why don’t you like him?” she said.

“I don’t know. I just don’t.”

“You wouldn’t be jealous, and kid me, would you?”

“Good God, what do you think I am?… Haven’t you got any eyes or any taste? Why he’s a sap, Coralyn, a perfect sap! A backbone of boiled vermicelli, the soul of a lascivious fish! The woods are full of such things. Greenwich Village woods especially. He’s weak, he’s conceited, he’ll use you as a convenience and discard you when he’s tired of you—but what’s the use of saying all that? You know it as well as I do.”

It seemed to me that she shivered a little, as she stood with her back to the empty fireplace.

“I know his appearance is against him—but he’s really nice, when you know him.”

“Perhaps he is”—I shrugged my shoulders—“but I assure you I don’t want to know him.”

“I think you’re mean, Philip.”

“What’s mean about it?”

“It’s the way you say it that’s mean.… You know how much I wanted your opinion of him—and how much I wanted it to be favorable. I wouldn’t have done such a thing with anyone else in the world, and you know that too. And really, really, Philip, I thought you’d like him.”

She let fall another pair of tears, silently—I lighted a cigarette—the clock struck the half-hour—a planetary world of dustmotes danced in the blurred shaft of sunlight that came between the curtains at the window.

“You see,” she said, “I’m in love with him.”

“Dear Coralyn—I know you are.”

“Do you think I ought to marry him?”

“Certainly not.”

“He’s younger than I am—but he’s older than he looks.”

“And no doubt very sophisticated! In fact, it sticks out all over him. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that he has a lobster in his pocket or a couple of perverted kinkajous.”

She sat down slowly in a chair by the hearth, and then said—

“That wasn’t necessary.”

“No—I’m sorry. I’m sorry.… But you see—”

What had crossed my mind, suddenly, was all that background which poor honest Michael had sketched for me. Should I dive into that?

“You see,” I said, “I know much more about you than you think I do. Michael has been here.”

Her face hardened.

“Oh, has he!”

“Yes.… And to be perfectly frank, I wonder whether the time hasn’t come for you to drop all this sort of nonsense entirely, once and for all. It’s no good. As Michael said, and it won’t hurt you to hear it, you’re simply going to the devil.… Good God, Coralyn, can’t you see it when you look into your mirror in the morning? I even know what you were doing in Paris.” (This was a lie.)

She flushed, her lips parted, she looked as if she were again going to cry, but didn’t, and after a pause during which she looked at me steadily and with an extraordinary sadness, she said—

“I know it, Philip—I know it, I know it—oh, my God, don’t I know it!… What else for God’s sake do I think about from morning to night? That’s why I want to marry Hugh. Even suppose it turns out badly, it’s at least a temporary anchorage—I can rest—”

“No, you couldn’t. The only rest for you would be to clear out of New York, and this sort of life, for good and all. Marry Michael—that’s the thing for you, if you want my honest opinion!”

She laughed at me quite frankly, for this, and with a sudden real gayety.

“Oh, Michael!” she said. “Poor old Michael.… Why, he wouldn’t last a week. Why, he’s too good. He’s a lamb—much too much of a lamb. Good God, no.”

“Well, then, dear Coralyn, I shrug my shoulders, as the saying is. I have no further suggestions to offer, except that you should reform—”

“—while there’s still time, you mean.”

“Yes!”

“Thanks. Keep the change.”

“You’re entirely welcome.”

The conversation dropped; and before it could be resumed, Mabel and the worm came in from the garden, and we sat down to the inevitable game of bridge. I had no further private talk with Coralyn—she and her abominable little vermiform appendage went back to New York early the following morning. If I had only known it, it was the last time I ever had a decent talk with her. And how miserable it makes me now to realize that; to realize how little I did for her, how unkind I was, and how unsympathetic. If I had only tried a little harder—but what use is there in being sentimental about it? And as for the final episode in my relations with poor Coralyn—I can hardly bear to speak of it. It’s quite the most revolting thing I ever did in my life.

V.

Before that was to happen, however, a great deal of water was to flow under bridges. To begin with, it became evident that Coralyn had practically dropped us—or to be more exact, had dropped me. It was clear enough too that I had hurt her feelings—had spoken too much of the truth—had seen into her a little too deeply. Anyway, we ceased to see her at all. We had a hasty note or two from her (as usual from new addresses) a postcard or two from holiday resorts—Atlantic City, Louisville, Hot Springs—and that was all. A year passed, and with it brought our own beginnings of tragedy. Mabel fell ill with consumption—at first it was not thought to be serious, and it was merely suggested, not urged, that she ought to go to the mountains. It was with the idea of making a virtue of necessity that we decided to spend a year in Europe, mostly in Switzerland—the first holiday we had had in a long time; and one from which poor Mabel was not destined to return. It was on the eve of our departure that we had really staggering news from Coralyn—the announcement of her marriage to Michael. A characteristically breathless and frivolous note from Coralyn, to which was added in a postscript, “You see, funny old Philip, I’ve taken your advice!” (A postscript, I may mention, which made Mabel look at me with some surprise—and perhaps with something of a surmise as well.) There was also for me, at my office, a letter from Michael. It was a typical seafaring man’s letter—curt, inarticulate, honest; it conveyed the impression that Michael had practically forced Coralyn to marry him, and as a sort of last desperate measure for saving her. Something in it, between the lines—I don’t now recall just what it was—made me think that things must have been pretty bad. It made one think of the animal rescue league, or something like that. Had she actually, finally, gone completely to the dogs? And would she now be successfully reclaimed? Or would she pull poor good Michael—that lamb—down to whatever it was that she herself had fallen to? What about that?…

We sent them a wedding present, and went to Davos. Into this part of my life, with its tragic ending, I won’t digress—it has really nothing to do with the story of Coralyn. Let it be enough that at the end of just over a year I came back to America alone. And it was this time purely by chance that I encountered Coralyn—and again in the lobby of the Belmont, where I was staying.

She looked appalling—quite literally appalling. Her face was a ghastly white, except for its deliberate scarlets; she was shabbily overdressed; and there was a new furtive something in her bearing. She continually dropped her eyes, or turned them away, in the brief moment of talk we had, and punctuated her remarks with a short little laugh which sounded insincere and possibly hysterical. I asked her where Michael was—Oh, he had lost his job in the Navy, and they were living in a boarding house in Fourteenth Street, temporarily hard-up. On my asking whether I couldn’t see them before I went back to New Haven, she was at first markedly evasive; and then, with obvious reluctance, asked me to drop in after dinner. It was only as we parted that she showed a flash of the Coralyn I knew—otherwise I might to all intents have been talking with a stranger.

“That was the very best of your clumsy fox-paws, poor old Philip!” she said. “You transcended yourself, that time.”

“What on earth do you mean?”

“Marrying me to Michael, you goose!”

“I marrying you—”

“Yes, you marrying me—but in the wrong sense!” and with that she turned quickly and walked away.

And that evening—but perhaps the less said of it the better. I understood quickly enough why Coralyn had not wanted me to come. The boarding house was forlorn beyond words—dark, smelly, dirty, with rails missing from the banisters; the kind of thing you see in movies of the slums. And the little room into which I was shown at the back of the house was as dreary. Coralyn opened the door—she looked better in the meager gaslight, and in an old dress (one that I remembered) somewhat worn, but becoming. She indicated the sofa, with a vague gesture and a smile, and there I saw Michael, asleep.

“Michael is hors de combat,” she said. “Looking for a job all day.”

“I’m sorry.”

“But sit down, do.”

We sat down, but somehow had little to say. I became uneasily conscious of the fact that Michael was not so much asleep as drunk. Presently he half opened his eyes and stared at me.

“Oh, hello!” he said. “Glad to see you. Talk to Corry. Don’t mind me—I’m a little tight!… Sleep it off. Glad to see you.…”

That was Michael’s only entrance into the conversation. He fell genuinely asleep, and snored, while Coralyn and I made a pretense (extremely uneasy, in the circumstances) of keeping things up. She said they had lived in Chicago for a while; she thought a little of going back there. They had lived also in Buffalo, in Boston, and in Perth Amboy. Why Perth Amboy? I never discovered. She had had lots of adventures—she laughed, looking at me out of the corners of her eyes, to make sure that I got the furtive implication—and she still managed, in spite of everything—(and here she glanced at Michael)—to have a good time. She smoked a cigarette with a long holder, and I saw that her stockings were rolled below the knee. Presently, when Michael’s snores had become louder, she said—

“I don’t suppose you want to go out anywhere?… There’s a nice little speakeasy just round the corner.…”

I declined this gambit; just why, I don’t know. Somehow it offended me. She knew that I was offended. She herself looked hurt for a moment—with that extraordinary childlike appearance of softness and innocence which she was always capable of—and changed the subject. I asked, eventually, how Michael had lost his job—she gave her odd little laugh and said we had better not go into that. And then added, quietly, lowering her eyes and voice, while she touched delicately her cigarette ash into an ashtray, that she and Michael were agreed to get a divorce.…

“I’ve made a hash of it,” she said.

“So I see. I’m sorry, Coralyn.”

“Oh, I shall get along—I’ll enjoy myself, don’t worry, for God’s sake. But it was a hell of a trick on poor Michael. Wasn’t it, Michael?”

Michael made no answer.

“And a bad move for little Coralyn. But I’m hard-boiled now. You don’t know the half of it! I could shock your heart out, Philip.”

“I don’t doubt it,” I said bitterly. “You ought to be ashamed. Why don’t you snap to?”

“Oh, ideels—” she said, snapping her fingers in the air—“I ain’t got none no mo’.… Every woman for herself, from now on. And the devil take the blindest!”

I left, shortly after this—she saw me to the door.

“Come again”—was all she said—“when I’m single.”

VI.

And it was, as a matter of fact, after she was again “single” that I did next talk to her—and for the last time—a year later—but it was also after the terrible episode which I have mentioned: my betrayal of Coralyn, the betrayal for which I am afraid she never forgave me—or should I say will never forgive me? I don’t know. Nor do I really know altogether how it was that I came to do such a thing. It was simply one of those quick blind chemical reactions (or perhaps I should say psychological?) to which all of us yield, from time to time in our lives, without clearly realizing what we are doing. There is no doubt that I was angry with Coralyn—disappointed in her—perhaps even jealous. That last scene, in the boarding house, had distressed and poisoned me. I found it hard to forgive. Did I perhaps, actually, for a while, hate Coralyn? I think I did. I wanted to revenge myself. Just why, or for what—after all, she had done little enough to me—I find it difficult to say. I felt, certainly, that she had let me down. I felt too that she had behaved atrociously to poor Michael—she seemed to be absolutely without any moral sense in her treatment of him—it was clear enough that she had ruined his life. I had no doubt that in some way it was she who had lost him his job, and reduced him, poor fellow, to the wretched state in which I had seen him. And if, underneath all this, I was aware of a deep sympathy for Coralyn, it was certainly not uppermost when, during my talk with Tom Thaxter, my fiendish idea occurred to me.

Tom—whom I met, for the first time in several years, at a class reunion—had been one of my best friends at college. He was a notorious Don Juan. The list of his conquests would have made Casanova turn in his grave. He was bold, witty, ruthless—not exactly handsome, but certainly impressive—with a fantastic imagination; and one of the most entertaining talkers I have ever known. When one talked with him, one talked about women. It was a foregone conclusion. In fact, it became a sort of class joke. One simply slapped him on the back, when one met him, and said, “Well, who’s the latest?” And Tom would narrate the conquest of the latest, with something very like genius. He was famous for his bawdy after-dinner speeches. And especially famous for one particular occasion, when, at a dinner in mixed company (the wives being present), he rose, and began to tell us a story which he had previously told to the men alone. The story was a frightful one—instantly there was a panic. Whispered adjurations to “sit down, Tom” and “shut up, Tom” were addressed to him in vain. In vain were his coattails plucked. He grinned and went on, while the rest of us cowered in our chairs. And when the climax to the story arrived, he gave it an ending of entire innocence, quite as funny as the other. Though, funny as it was, I think the ladies never clearly understood why it was so extravagantly applauded.

And it was while Tom was telling me his latest, over a Tom Collins, that my fiendish idea occurred to me. I would tell him about Coralyn—describe her in the most glowing terms—make her out to be the most skillful and witty and wary of adventuresses—and then bet him that he couldn’t add her to his list. It would serve her right. It was just exactly as she ought to be treated. Do her good. And what was more, I would get an enormous satisfaction out of hearing from Tom, later, all the details of the battle. It would have the effect for me of finally, once and for all, putting Coralyn in her place.…

Tom, needless to say, was delighted; his eyes glowed. We made a bet of ten dollars on it, I gave him her address, he promised to let me know what happened, and off he went, smiling with anticipation. As for myself, I then screwed the affair to its highest possible pitch by writing to Coralyn. I told her that I was sending my friend Tom Thaxter to see her, and warned her, facetiously, that he was “dangerous.” I added that I thought him the most attractive man I knew, rich, unmarried, and merciless. Fastidious, a difficult man to please, an even more difficult one to outwit.… She wrote no answer to my letter.

And what happened I heard from Tom two weeks later, when he spent a night with me in New Haven especially to tell me. They had had three or four terrific parties, one after another, at dances, speakeasies, in her apartment; as he put it, a stand-up knock-down fight. Hammer and tongs. The cagiest girl he had ever met. Amusing as the devil. The second night, when she had taken a few too many drinks, she weakened a little, in the taxi going back to her apartment at two in the morning, and there had been a pretty violent love scene. He had thought he was on the verge of victory. But no such luck; she slipped away from him at the door and locked him out, laughing.

“The little devil!” he murmured, reminiscently. “The little she-fiend!”

He shook his head, and continued. After that, it appeared, she had been warier. She made fun of him. When he tried to kiss her, she tickled him. She even suggested that he had been put up to the exploit by his nice friend Philip. (I winced.) But when he suggested that she should join him in Philadelphia for three days, she astonished him, all of a sudden, by saying that she would. And what is more, she did! She wired him at his hotel and arrived. But again she surprised him. She arrived with another girl—a girl whose name I’ve forgotten, and whom I’d never heard of—and they got three days of extremely expensive entertainment out of him—to be exact, she cost him two hundred dollars in parties—and all for nothing.

“Nothing?” I said.

“Not a thing. Not even a kiss.”

“Well, I’m damned. A mere gold-digger.”

“Gold-digger!… Wait till you hear the rest of it.”

The rest was brief and to the point. On the last night, when he again tried to make love to her (and he said she was really looking quite beautiful) and when he proposed that she should come away with him somewhere, she again staggered him by saying that she would: on one condition. When he asked what the condition was, she said, “A thousand dollars.”

The thing had floored him; he couldn’t believe it. This wasn’t at all (and he looked at me a little oddly) what I had led him to expect! He asked her if she meant it, and she replied that of course she did.

“‘Do you mean to say’—I said to her—‘you just want money?’”

“‘That’s what I said, kid—one grand!’”

And he had, of course, left it at that. That had made it—in every way—did I see?—out of the question. Impossible. It had simply ruined the whole thing.…

I acquiesced, there was a pause, and then he said—

“You know, I think she’s in some sort of trouble. I may be wrong, but I think so. I even hinted as much to her, but she only laughed at me. Just the same—have you any idea what it might be?”

I assured him that I hadn’t—cursing myself for a damned liar and cad—and after discussing the strange affair a little further, casually, we went to bed. But I lay awake a long while, wondering whether Tom wasn’t right.… Why had she needed that thousand dollars?… Why?

VII.

I never saw Coralyn again. A few weeks later I spoke with her on the telephone, and tried in vain to make an appointment to see her—she laughed, she was vague, she said she was busy, she called me an old fool, and finally, in the middle of a long speech I was making, she hung up the receiver with an ironic “goodbye, old dear.” I was so angry that I swore I’d never attempt to look her up again.

I did try, however, as might have been expected; but in vain. I found that she had disappeared; this was six months later. I spent an entire day in New York, a day of misery, tracing her from one address to another. At the last, in West 22nd Street, I drew a blank. The janitor said she had left two months before, owing rent, and had never sent for her things. There was some mail for her, too—she had apparently not left a forwarding address at the district post office. Was I a friend of hers? Did I want to see her things, or take them away?…

I went into a dusty storeroom in the cellar, with white-washed walls, and under a dull gas-jet looked at the pathetic remnants. A trunk full of worthless oddments. A few books—a copy of Daniel Deronda, one of What Maisie Knew, a file of clippings from newspapers (mostly culinary), a pair of Japanese slippers, a gray tweed coat which I had seen many times before, and a box of letters—there was little enough. I took the copy of What Maisie Knew, and told the janitor to do what he liked with the other things; I also took the letters, giving the janitor my address, in case Coralyn should turn up; though somehow I felt sure she wouldn’t. Then, after paying Coralyn’s rent—the first and last time I ever paid Coralyn’s rent—I took the letters home unopened, and locked them in my desk.

Five years have passed. Is Coralyn still alive? Is she dead? What has become of her?… Almost against my will, I hope she is alive, for I desperately want to see her again—why? Am I still in love with her?—But at the bottom of my heart I hope, for her sake, she is dead.