Of course "out of his life" was a phrase. They would meet again. But
not now, not until they had had time to become resigned to what they had
already accepted. The war would not last forever. And then she thought
of their love, which had been born and had grown, always with war at its
background. They had gone along well enough until this winter, and then
everything had changed. Chris, Natalie, Clayton, herself--none of them
were quite what they had been. Was that one of the gains of war, that
sham fell away, and people revealed either the best or the worst in
them?
War destroyed, but it also revealed.
The temptation was to hear Clayton's voice again. She went to the
telephone, and stood with the instrument in her hands, thinking. Would
it comfort him? Or would it only bring her close for a moment, to
emphasize her coming silence?
She put it down, and turned away. When, some time later, the taxicab
came to take her to Perry Street, she was lying on her bed in the dusk,
face-down and arms outstretched, a lonely and pathetic figure, all her
courage dead for the moment, dead but for the desire to hear Clayton's
voice again before the silence closed down.
She got up and pinned on her hat for the last time, before the mirror of
the little inlaid dressing-table. And she smiled rather forlornly at her
reflection in the glass.
"Well, I've got the present, anyhow," she considered. "I'm not going
either to wallow in the past or peer into the future. I'm going to
work."
The prospect cheered her. After all, work was the great solution. It was
the great healer, too. That was why men bore their griefs better than
women. They could work.
She took a final glance around her stripped and cheerless rooms. How
really little things mattered! All her life she had been burdened with
things. Now at last she was free of them.
The shabby room on Perry Street called her. Work called, beckoned to her
with calloused, useful hands. She closed and locked the door and went
quietly down the stairs.