Souls Belated - Page 2

caught herself doling out piecemeal
what, in the first prodigality of their confidences, she would have flung
to him in a breath. Their silence therefore might simply mean that they
had nothing to say; but it was another disadvantage of their position that
it allowed infinite opportunity for the classification of minute
differences. Lydia had learned to distinguish between real and factitious
silences; and under Gannett's she now detected a hum of speech to which
her own thoughts made breathless answer.

How could it be otherwise, with that thing between them? She glanced up at
the rack overhead. The _thing_ was there, in her dressing-bag,
symbolically suspended over her head and his. He was thinking of it now,
just as she was; they had been thinking of it in unison ever since they
had entered the train. While the carriage had held other travellers they
had screened her from his thoughts; but now that he and she were alone she
knew exactly what was passing through his mind; she could almost hear him
asking himself what he should say to her....

* * * * *

The thing had come that morning, brought up to her in an innocent-looking
envelope with the rest of their letters, as they were leaving the hotel at
Bologna. As she tore it open, she and Gannett were laughing over some
ineptitude of the local guide-book--they had been driven, of late, to
make the most of such incidental humors of travel. Even when she had
unfolded the document she took it for some unimportant business paper sent
abroad for her signature, and her eye travelled inattentively over the
curly _Whereases_ of the preamble until a word arrested her:--Divorce.
There it stood, an impassable barrier, between her husband's name and
hers.

She had been prepared for it, of course, as healthy people are said to be
prepared for death, in the sense of knowing it must come without in the
least expecting that it will. She had known from the first that Tillotson
meant to divorce her--but what did it matter? Nothing mattered, in those
first days of supreme deliverance, but the fact that she was free; and not
so much (she had begun to be aware) that freedom had released her from
Tillotson as that it had given her to Gannett. This discovery had not been
agreeable to her self-esteem. She had preferred to think that Tillotson
had himself embodied all her reasons for leaving him; and those he
represented had seemed cogent enough to stand in no need of reinforcement.
Yet she had not left him till she met Gannett. It was her love for Gannett
that had made life with Tillotson so poor and incomplete a business. If
she had never, from the first, regarded her marriage as a full cancelling
of her claims upon life, she had at least, for a number of years, accepted