Rachel was sitting by the fire in Melissa’s bedroom, sewing swiftly and delicately on the brown velvet destined for tomorrow, when the door burst open and Melissa rushed in with a great noise. Startled, Rachel let the velvet slide from her knees, she stood up and stared at Melissa.
“Is there something you wish, Mrs. Dunham?” she asked, noting Melissa’s hot eyes and air of disorder and rout. What ever had happened to the poor young lady now? She watched in stupefaction as Melissa ran to the dressing-table and began to throw off her jewels with wild haste. “What is the matter, ma’am?” asked the girl in distress, approaching Melissa. “Do you wish to change your jewelry?”
Melissa turned her head jerkily over her shoulder and cried: “No, of course not! I’m just going to bed, that’s all, Rachel. I’m tired.”
Dumfounded, Rachel glanced at the gilt clock on the mantelpiece. It was hardly half-past ten. She saw that Melissa’s hands were shaking. The girl was unpinning her hair, and it suddenly fell in a heavy uncoiling length down her back. “But Mrs. Dunham, they are just starting the music downstairs,” faltered Rachel. It was all very confusing. Melissa, in spite of her feverish color, was apparently in the best of health. One did not leave one’s guests; it was not done even for such a reason as sudden indisposition. And especially not on one’s wedding night. Her bewilderment grew as she stood beside Melissa, who was struggling with the buttons of the blue gown. Automatically, Rachel assisted. The white flesh under her finger tips was hot.
Melissa jerked away at the girl’s touch. “I can manage, Rachel. And what are you doing here, anyway? Why aren’t you in bed?”
“Why, ma’am, I am supposed to remain here until you come, to assist you, no matter what the time,” said Rachel.
“Oh, what nonsense!” cried Melissa. “Do you mean,” she continued, arrested in her haste by the outrageous idea, “that if I didn’t arrive until midnight, or later, you’d just sit here, yawning and tired, until I came?”
“Why, certainly, ma’am. That is my duty.”
“Nonsense!” exclaimed Melissa, roundly. “You just leave here at once and go to bed, Rachel.”
Rachel’s confusion mounted. She glanced hopefully at the door, expecting Mr. Dunham. But the door remained blandly closed. Melissa had reached an acute stage in her undressing, and was waiting impatiently for Rachel to leave. She had seated herself on a stool and had taken off her boots, which she now tossed aside with a clatter. Her hot agitation was growing, and this was so intense a contrast with her frozen misery and dumbness of the morning that Rachel was alarmed.
“Ma’am, what is wrong?” asked the girl, impulsively. She let herself drop on the edge of the chair she had vacated, and fumbled absently with the heap of brown velvet beside it. “Has something happened?” she added, hoping that Melissa would not consider her impertinent.
But Melissa did not think Rachel impertinent in the least. Her snobbery was not social, but intellectual, and as she considered Rachel seriously she felt an immense confidence in her servant and an inexplicable desire to unburden herself and find an answer to the puzzling events of the night. She lifted her hands from her stocking, and clenched them in her shimmering lap. She appeared very young and bewildered and vaguely frightened, on her stool, with her hair on her shoulders, her cheeks very pink, and her eyes very wide and baffled.
“Rachel,” she said, “I have done something terrible downstairs, but I don’t know what it is. Anyway, they are all stupid and obtuse, and they bored me horribly. Except Mr. Littlefield. Who is a poet,” she added, with a touch of enthusiasm. “He understood. I’m sure he did, but they were all so shocked, and it was all so tiresome, and they were all so dull, that I am afraid he was infected by them. I wouldn’t have cared, but Mr. Dunham was hurt, in some way.” She pushed the hair back from her forehead, and frowned, and sighed. “No one explained. I thought Mr. Dunham would be glad when I joined the dinner conversation, for I felt that he thought me very tedious, just stitting there and not finding anything to say. So I joined the conversation.”
Oh, dear, thought Rachel. And what did the poor young lady say?
She clasped her hands on her knees, and her queer affection for Melissa made her round dark eyes soft and receptive. She waited.
Melissa was becoming excited and baffled again. “They were talking about books, and publishing, and the indifference of people to classic works of art, Rachel. Mr. Dunham caught Mr. Littlefield in an argument about Balzac.” She paused. “What do you think of Balzac, Rachel? My father thought him an impossible scribbler, and meretricious.”
“I am sure Mr. Balzac, then, must be a very poor sort of gentlemen,” said Rachel. “He cannot have been a man of breeding,” she went on, wondering what “scribbler” and “meretricious” might mean. But she made her voice disapproving, to match the scorn on Melissa’s face. Apparently she had said the right thing, though Melissa remarked: “Well, I don’t know or care whether he was a gentleman or not. That doesn’t matter. It is his books which matter. The man is unimportant. The point is, has he contributed anything of immortal value to the world, or is he just a passing sensation?”
“Only time will tell,” said Rachel sententiously, and with intuitive genius.
Melissa nodded vigorously, pleased. “Naturally, time is the test of all things. But there are definite signs, just now, that the man’s works are of no value. My father pointed them out to me, and his judgment was always infallible.” Her mouth saddened, then she lifted her head proudly.
“Well,” she said, “I do not condemn Mr. Littlefield too severely for his admiration for Balzac. Even the best minds can be dazzled and led astray, temporarily, in the face of public clamor, which, of course, cannot be trusted in the least. But Mr. Dunham quite caught him in a trap, and it was most inconsiderate. Moreover, the argument was fallacious.
I wished to set Mr. Dunham to rights, and mentioned my father’s works, how poorly they had been received by the people. I also mentioned that I did not quite believe this. I’ve had a suspicion for some time that his works sold better than reported by Mr. Dunham, and I shall suggest, tomorrow, that Mr. Dunham make a personal investigation of his ac count books. Chicanery is not unknown in the publishing business, Rachel,” added Melissa, darkly. “I believe Mr, Dunham, himself, is being cheated, in his own offices.” Rachel was not following all this very clearly, but she caught enough of the import to be aghast. “Oh, ma’am,” she murmured, “did you actually say someone was cheating Mr. Dunham?”
Melissa considered acutely, staring into space. Then she bit her lip. “I am very sorry,” she said, uncertainly. She stared again. “However, I only expressed my opinion. Everyone has a right to his opinion.”
She pulled off her stockings, and flung them from her. Then, becoming aware of Rachel’s silence, she exclaimed defensively: “How can they be so sensitive and absurd? Mr. Dunham, too? I thought he was a man of sense. Is it forbidden to express an opinion? Must one always watch one’s words? Such hypocrisy! No wonder the world is filled with liars and mendacious rascals! I, for one, will never subscribe to such mealymouthed conventions. Besides, I didn’t say outright that anyone was cheating, least of all, Mr. Dunham.” “Then what happened, ma’am?”
“Oh, it was all so ridiculous! I saw I had, in their opinion, done something outrageous. What does one do then? Why, one removes oneself. It is simple. So I said I was going to bed, and that I didn’t want to join the ladies. Why should I have ‘joined the ladies’? They are all very stupid, I am sure that I should have found their conversation tiresome, and why should anyone allow himself to be bored by anyone else? Life is too short, as my father used to say. He would say that if you found yourself in tedious company you owed it to yourself and to your integrity to withdraw. So, I did.” Oh, heavens, sighed Rachel to herself. She moistened her lips, said gently and bravely: “But ma’am, that—that isn’t customary. A lady is supposed to remain with her guests, and not to leave them.”
“But they aren’t my guests,” said Melissa, with sharp simplicity. “I don’t know them. I didn’t invite them. They were here when I came. They are Arabella’s friends. Let her entertain them. What have I to do with it?”
“But you are mistress of this household now, ma’am,” ventured Rachel, seeing that Melissa had no idea that her maid was “impudent,” or was “forgetting her place.”
Melissa was appalled. “Ought I to have remained, Rachel? Honestly, now? Ought I to have gone into the drawing-room, with those odious dull females, as was suggested? What a waste of time! How absurd! When there are so many important things to do!”
She was outraged at the very thought. But her eyes, fixed on Rachel, were uncertain and troubled. “If you are right, and I cannot think you are, then Mr. Dunham must be very annoyed with me.”
“There are certain social customs, ma’am,” said Rachel, full of pity. She had an impulse to go to Melissa and kiss her, an impulse which immediately shocked her.
Melissa looked at her boots and stockings. “Ought I to go down at once, then?”
“I think it would only make matters worse, ma’am,” sighed Rachel, with a vision of Melissa suddenly rushing back into the drawing-room where the ladies were doubtless avidly enjoying themselves at the poor girl’s expense.
“It is a quandary,” said Melissa, frowning. Then she was vexed again. “How foolishly matters are handled here! I foresee a very entertaining life for me,” she added, with gloom. Her face hardened. “Well, I shall do no more than is necessary. No one can ask more. I have my own life to live, and I have work to do.” She was full of vigor again, she glanced at the white-and-gold chest which held her father’s manuscripts. “I must be becoming hypocritical. I told them, and you, that I was going to bed. That is untrue. I have no intention of going to bed. I am going to work.”
“You told the guests you were going to bed?” faltered Rachel. She colored faintly. “On your wedding night, ma’am? What did Mr. Dunham say?”
“Nothing at all,” replied Melissa, missing the implication entirely. “Naturally, he could not leave with me, for, as you said, they are his guests.” She was proud of her new knowledge of etiquette. “Even though he complained to me today that Arabella was the one who really invited them, not he. But it would have been rude for the host, however involuntarily he was host, to walk off and leave his sister alone to entertain these tiresome people.”
Rachel had been well grounded in the subject of social usage, and now, listening to Melissa, she felt dazed. Here was a young woman, obviously well-bred and of good family, educated and patrician, speaking in the accents of the best drawing-rooms, and yet she was as ignorant of custom as a baby in arms. It was not to be understood. Her arguments, too, were so crystalline, so forthright and simple, that it was hard to meet them with conventional objections. She would not have comprehended in the least I must teach her, thought Rachel, for her own sake, poor young lady. What innocence!
Melissa was now tired of the subject, which she considered petty and time-wasting. She had work to do. Never had she felt so wide awake, so urgent and clear-minded. She could work for hours!
“Do go to bed, Rachel,” she said, starting up. “I want to get undressed, and then I shall sit at that desk, yonder, and get to work. I have wasted enough time as it is, and it is desperately necessary for me to complete my father’s manuscripts.”
“You are going to work, ma’am? Now?” asked Rachel, incredulously. A young and ingenuous bride going to bed, to await her bridegroom with blushings and trepidation, was not too out of the ordinary, but a bride who, on her wedding night, fled to her bedroom for the sole purpose of working, was not to be accepted by a sane mind.
“Certainly, I am going to work. I’ve idled away enough time,” said Melissa, eyeing her maid with open impatience. Whatever she had thought that afternoon in her tub was completely forgotten now, her single-hearted intent fixed only on one object. She was incapable of harboring more than one idea at a time. She was like a sword with a single edge, incapable of cutting in more than one direction. “Do run along, Rachel. How can I undress if you linger here?”
Still disoriented and incredulous, Rachel said: “But I am supposed to help you undress, ma’am, to lay out your nightdress, and to put away your gown.”
“Oh, how nonsensical!” cried Melissa. “Am I ill, or a cripple? And why should you, a woman, do such degrading things for me, another woman, quite capable of taking care of herself? Am I a parasite, a sybarite?” She paused. “Do you mean,” she added, disbelievingly, “that other women permit such services, debasing alike to the servant and to the one served?”
“It is customary, ma’am, if a lady can afford a personal maid,” answered Rachel, wearily.
“Well, I shall certainly not permit it,” said Melissa, roundly. “Go away at once, Rachel. You look very tired. Heat a glass of milk for yourself, put in plenty of loaf sugar, and go to bed. It will help you get a good night’s sleep.”
Rachel glanced at the fire. “If you will permit it, ma’am, I should like to remain here and finish this dress, and replenish the fire when you need it.”
“Will you go away?” exclaimed Melissa, angrily. “Of course, you mustn’t stay here. I couldn’t work with you in the room. And there’s plenty of coal. I can throw on some more, if I need it. Besides, this room is too hot. Heat stultifies the mind.”
Rachel, in silence, went to a chest, brought out a foam of lace and silk and ribbons and laid it on Melissa’s bed. “What’s that?” demanded the girl, approaching.
“Your nightgown, of course, ma’am.”
Scornfully, and with an exclamation, Melissa lifted up the delicate cloud and held it at arm’s length. “This? I never heard of such a thing! The room will grow too cold, later on, and I should get lung fever. So flimsy and ridiculous. Do women actually wear such things? Where are my flannel nightgowns, Rachel?”
Rachel faltered: “Why, Mr. Dunham told me to throw them away, ma’am.”
Melissa colored, with anger and embarrassment. “He saw them, Rachel? You showed my nightgowns to him?”
“No, Mrs. Dunham. He opened the chest and inspected them, himself.”
“How dared he! Why, this is outrageous! How could he have brought himself to invade my privacy?” Melissa’s embarrassment was gone. She was full of umbrage at Geoffrey’s calm insolence.
Rachel said nothing. Melissa flung the nightgown disdainfully onto the bed. Then she became aware of Rachel’s distress. A little warmth, unique and strange, touched her hard young heart. It was all too amusing and absurd, but apparently one could hurt by saying the most natural things, and she saw hurt in Rachel’s dark little face.
“Oh, Rachel, if you think it best, I shall wear the silly thing, though if I have a cold tomorrow, and a dreadful sore throat, we shall know who is to blame. But all those ribbons!” she went on, looking contemptuously at the nightgown. “I shall never manage the ribbons.” She had another thought. “My woolen dressing gown. Where is it?”
Sighing, Rachel produced a dressing gown of thin blue wool and lace, and quietly laid it beside the nightgown. The two young women contemplated the garments in a profound silence. Then they looked at each other. Simultaneously, they smiled, then began to laugh a little. Melissa’s laughter came rustily and awkwardly, then with a quicker rush, almost gay and childlike.
She then literally pushed Rachel from the room. She undressed quickly, piling the pretty clothing carelessly on a chair, and pushed the boots under the rungs. She found her carpet slippers and, with a sigh of relief, thrust her feet into them. Then, scowling, she put on the nightgown. It fell in a cloud about her, clinging to her body. She awkwardly tied the ribbons, straightened the lace. The foolish thing had no weight or substance or warmth. She glanced in the mirror, and was arrested at the lovely reflection. She bent and peered closer. Her hair flowed about her, her flesh gleamed through the silk. She huriedly pulled on the blue wool gown. It was too short, but it was surprisingly warm. Forgetting everything, Melissa suddenly ran to the chest where her father’s manuscripts lay, retrieved the precious papers, and heaped them on the pretty gold-and-white desk. Impatiently, she laid various crystal and porcelain articles on the floor, put out her sturdy ugly pens, pencils and ink-pot. She sat and stared at the manuscript, and then at the pile of reference books near her feet. Absently, she caught up her hair and braided it with tense fingers. Her mind had already left this room and this house, and all that it contained. The long braid fell down her back; she bent over the manuscript and the note-books, pen in hand. She began to write.
Now there was no sound in the room but that of the pen and the crackling fire. But outside it had begun to storm and a wind hurled itself savagely against the closed shutters. Sparks flew up the chimney. Music sounded softly downstairs. Melissa was oblivious.
This manuscript of Charles Upjohn’s dealt with the philosophers of a certain phase of the Athenian Republic. Charles had considered that a sterile era. He quoted Machiavelli: “Republics have a longer life and enjoy better fortune than principalities, because they can profit by their greater internal diversity. They are the better able to meet emergencies.” Charles took cold but strong offense at this. “Republics,” said his notes, “produce nothing but hypocritical equality. No sensible man believes that equality is possible, for equality, put into practice, is an outrage to nature herself. The majority of men are born for obscurity and death. They have no function in life except to serve the superior man. Under aristocratic governments, this is accepted and acknowledged, and so, under such governments, we see the full flowering of the arts, their purest expression and essence, uncorrupted, uncoarsened and undefiled by the common touch. But Republics, admitting, as they do, the common man into all the precincts of the arts, encourage him to enter with his smell of offal, his dirt of averageness, his mud of mediocrity. He carries with him, also, the potential thunderbolt of anarchy, which can destroy the sacred temples. The distortion of the doctrine spreads to the lesser facets of life, so that eventually the servant protests at serving, leisure is curtailed for the superior man, who alone can envision the perfect civilization, and the drab dust of enforced neglect sifts over the pillared walls and the white colonnades.”
Melissa copied rapidly. How true, dear Papa, she thought, remembering the guests downstairs. Then she paused. But her father was not speaking derisively of those people who had leisure and education, fine homes and rich clothing. No, he was not speaking derisively of them. He was speaking for them! She knew that surely, with a kind of surprised sickness. Those he was attacking were such as Rachel, Rachel with the kind brown eyes and the worn little hands, Rachel, servant to her inferiors.
Melissa dropped her pen slowly from her fingers, and stared blindly before her. The queerest thoughts rushed into her mind—questioning, confused and amorphous thoughts. She glanced down at the manuscript. She read: “There are some who, like myself, believe that universal literacy would mean the epicedium of culture.”
No, thought Melissa, you are wrong, Papa. It is only that the wrong people, that too few people, have an opportunity for culture. Had Rachel been born among gentlefolk of means, or even gentlefolk without means, she might have displayed a mind of considerable stature. I’ve seen intelligence and understanding in her eyes. There is something wrong with your whole thesis, Papa.
The flight of her ideas became more confused, more rapid. She reread her father’s last sentence, and suddenly it had to her a cruel, lofty and stupid ring. Something like violent protest struggled in her mind, and a strange and fierce contempt. She recalled so many things her father had said, so many quotations from men like himself, men who believed that art remained art only so long as it was protected and hidden from the people. To these men it was a secret language; it had a secret code and handclasp. It was a marble cloister, a hidden city on a forbidden hill. Once entered by the masses of mankind, and it was no longer art, because it was comprehensible. That was their belief: That art must necessarily be obscure, precious, exquisitely inscrutable and impenetrable, incapable, by its very nature, of being translated into common speech. A book which was enjoyed by the many was unworthy of the interest of the superior man, who understood that because of its wide acceptance it was not art. A poem which the masses might repeat with love, was not truly a poem. Music adored by the mob was ludicrous, it was not music. A statue worshipped by common men was a common thing.
Greatly agitated, Melissa jumped to her feet and began to walk up and down the room, her gown flowing behind her as if in a high wind. What did the jeweled phrase matter, if it expressed nothing but its own sparkle? What potency was there in an artist who was interested only in art, as a thing in itself, and did not use it to make articulate the urgent but formless thoughts of other men? An artist who painted an unfathomable picture, whose meaning was not immediately and simply obvious, was a pretentious dauber, no matter what his skill. Music preoccupied only with its own intricacy, its own mathematical and convoluted perfection, was not music, however perfect its technique.
Melissa, stunned by her own heretical and lawless thoughts, stood before the fire, twisting her fingers together. She heard the wind outside, and it was like a shout. She turned her head nervously, and started. She thought someone had entered the room. But no one was there. Her thoughts began to ebb away, and now her mind became slowly empty and cold, and very tired.
Something has happened to me, she thought. Something very wrong. It is all this strangeness and excitement. This house. I have no right in this house. Everything has lost its clarity for me, in this house. Oh, I know where I got these thoughts I have been indulging. They are only an echo of what Mr. Dunham said tonight, when he made fun of Mr. Littlefield and held him up to the contempt of his superficial guests. Am I so weak, then, that I can let a callous man’s greedy ideas obscure my father’s ideals, a gross man’s sentiments besmirch my father’s inviolate convictions? Who is right, he or my father? He lives in luxury; my father lived in self-ordained poverty, because he preferred integrity to wealth, honor, to the prostituting of his genius in the open market place. My father was right, as he always was right.
She glanced about the lovely silent room, and hated it. She hated its delicate bright colors, its shine of gilt and white and crystal and silver. She hated the very fire on the hearth. All at once, she remembered Ravel Littlefield, and something stirred in her like a surge of gratitude and happiness. If only Papa had known him, she thought.
Resolutely, she returned to the desk and continued with her work. The music downstairs died away, lost in wind and silence. The fire burned low, flickered on the hearth. The pen scratched furiously. Note after note was coordinated smoothly. Melissa forgot her uneasy sense that someone was in the room with her watching remorselessly. Now peace and contentment filled her. The little clock chimed on and on, and she did not hear it.
A faint click reached her buried consciousness of her surroundings, and she started. Geoffrey Dunham was entering the room through his dressing-room, and he stood there Silently, closing the door behind him. He wore a long gown of maroon silk, tied with a silken cord, and there were slippers on his feet.
Melissa looked over her shoulder at him, the pen in her hand. She did not move. She was pale with exhaustion, and her eyes were glazed. It was some moments before she could orient herself, before she could become fully aware of where she was and of the presence of this man whom she had completely forgotten.
Slowly, she turned in her chair, pushing away a long strand of hair which had fallen over her forehead. She stared at Geoffrey numbly; her eyes travelled from his quietly smiling face to his feet. Then she jumped to her own feet and clutched the back of the chair, and her mouth opened soundlessly.
“What on earth are you doing, Melissa?” asked Geoffrey. He came slowly into the room, stopped at the hearth. He looked at the desk, and his brows moved quickly. But he made no comment, though he understood. “It is getting very cold in here. Why haven’t you put some coals on the fire?” He lifted the scuttle, tossed coals on the last pink embers, stirred the grate vigorously. A crackling and a burst of sparks rewarded him. He picked up the bellows and worked them. Melissa watched him, still clutching the chair.
All at once, she became aware that her blue robe had fallen away from her nightgown. She caught it swiftly and furtively together. Geoffrey was looking at her again. She smiled, and the smile made him frown a little, it was so terror-stricken and so pathetic, so desperately pleading.
“I’ve been working on my father’s notes,” she stammered. “I forgot the time.” She glanced at the clock. “It is almost two,” she added feebly. “I think I’ll go to bed. I’m very tired.”
Geoffrey said nothing. He just stood on the hearth and studied her, and his face darkened. Then, very slowly and deliberately, he walked towards her. She watched him come, and he saw the widening and too-brilliant stare of her eyes. She did not retreat, nor move, nor even shrink. He stopped now, before her. Then, still moving slowly as if not to startle her, he put his hands on her shoulders.
They looked at each other. He felt her agonized stiffness. Her eyes did not leave his; the iris had dwindled to a tiny glittering blackness of fear. Yet the poor foolish girl did not wince or try to free herself. She only waited.
A long time seemed to pass. Then Geoffrey took his hands from her shoulders. She stood where he had released her. He turned away from her, went back to the fire, stood and looked down at it. She would not let herself breathe more easily, nor relax her distraught tightness of muscle and body. She could only watch him in dread.
Geoffrey regarded the fire steadily and thoughtfully, as if he had forgotten her. She saw his profile, meditative and unreadable, with the firelight flickering on it. His hands were in his pockets. The dark red of his robe shimmered in a watery pattern. Melissa’s hands, aching from their clutch on the back of the chair, only tightened. So long as she did not move, did not speak, did not let go, nothing would happen. She had only to be very still like this, breathing only shallow breaths, not looking away from this terrible stranger who called himself her husband and called her his wife. She had only to regard him steadily and fixedly, like this, and he could do nothing but go away.
Geoffrey continued to study the fire. Oh, go, go! cried Melissa in herself. She was becoming aware of his bigness, his strength, and her terror became more alive and threatening. She swallowed slowly and carefully, to control it. There was a huge dry lump in her throat, If he came back to her, if he touched her again, she would collapse; she knew this. But what could she do?
Geoffrey turned his head and looked at her once more, but he made no movement towards her. She smiled convulsively. Geoffrey looked away quickly. Then he began to speak, in a very quiet and gentle voice:
“Don’t be frightened, Melissa. You may sit down.”
“Yes,” she whispered. Still keeping her eyes on him, she sat down, sideways, on the chair.
“Melissa,” he went on, after a long moment, and thoughtfully studying the fire, “I told you today that you mustn’t ever be afraid of me, or of anything in this house. I want you to remember that. There is nothing here to frighten you, and there never will be. Why are you frightened, now?”
She tried to speak, but the lump choked her. Then her voice came in a dry rustle: “I’m not afraid.”
“Good.” Geoffrey smiled somberly. He added steadily: “Did you think I would force myself on you, poor child?”
Melissa was silent. Geoffrey waited, not turning to her. Then he added impatiently: “You are a fool, Melissa. I’m your husband, and I want you. I am a man. Or didn’t you know? And you are a woman. You never knew that, did you? But all this doesn’t alter the case. I won’t force you. Try to remember that.”
She said, incredibly, and he could not believe his ears: “Thank you.”
He wanted to laugh.
He said: “Well, then. Good night, Melissa.”
He turned to her with a friendly smile, as though he were trying to keep from laughing. “Good night,” he repeated.
“Good night,” she replied.
He went to the door of his dressing-room, opened it, passed through, and closed the door behind him.
For a long time Melissa sat where she was. The clock chimed. The whole house was completely silent. There was no sound but the wind. Then Melissa moved her cramped alert body and a great sigh rushed past her lips; she dropped her head on the back of the chair. She began to tremble violently. The fire died down, and now the chill of the room struck her. She stood up, pushing against the chair, and staggered slightly. She looked at the closed door. She went to it along the stretch of the room and her eyes fixed themselves on the handle. She turned it involuntarily. It was locked.
Her hand dropped from the handle. But she remained standing against the door. Slowly, like a glacier moving over fields and meadows, a sudden and nameless desolation crept over the girl, a sudden sense of abandonment, of yearning and misery. She had no words for its overpowering anguish, for its profound sickness, for its sorrow. She was cold with it, paralyzed with it. She touched the handle again, wondering vaguely at her own huge pain, not understanding it, only suffering it.
After a very long time, shivering and exhausted, she crept into her bed and blew out the light. When, in the darkness, she felt the tears on her face, she was amazed, and said aloud in a voice of distressed wonder: “What is the matter with me?”