… becoming the Stranger …

—AITING QUIETLY TILL THE slamming of the front door showed he had gone, hands clutched together in her lap, a little hole in her mind where the bullet had gone through—“everyone has always known he walked out on you”—and nothing to put in its place but an old swimming pain, that same almost-forgotten pain of smiling gaily at the party, eyes fixed on companion—don’t turn, don’t wince, don’t pale, don’t show you see Andy pulling the blond girl out onto the balcony with that veiled excited look in his eyes she saw only for other women—yes, this pain was blurred like that old one had been and flowed outside as well as through her, tingled like frost in the air about her. Slowly phrases jumped into place in her brain—“Tired Truth barked at her heels”—say rather it tore at her heart. She stood up astonished that legs could support this heavy stone, legs marched out the door, one, two, one, two, downstairs one flight, see the picture of the landlord’s graduation class 1911, Brown University, under the hall lamp, down one flight more into the vestibule, and stop, turn, look. There was the card on her mailbox:

MRS. ANDREW CALLINGHAM

It had been there and on all her other mailboxes for years, secretly shaming her before the world. It was incredible that she had not realized its mocking pretensions before, somehow it had seemed only loyalty, it was to show Andy she bore no grudge, see, she really did understand him after all and was proud of the little while she had held him.… “A buried woman.” … “What fragment is left of that buried woman—” She pulled the little white card out of the mailbox and turned it over. On the back her trembling fingers printed in pencil—

MISS EFFIE THORNE

—and put it back in place.