Elizabeth had quite definitely put Dick out of her heart. On the evening
of the day she learned he had come back and had not seen her, she
deliberately killed her love and decently interred it. She burned her
notes and his one letter and put away her ring, performing the rites not
as rites but as a shameful business to be done with quickly. She tore
his photograph into bits and threw them into her waste basket, and
having thus housecleaned her room set to work to houseclean her heart.
She found very little to do. She was numb and totally without feeling.
The little painful constriction in her chest which had so often come
lately with her thoughts of him was gone. She felt extraordinarily
empty, but not light, and her feet dragged about the room.
She felt no sense of Dick's unworthiness, but simply that she was up
against something she could not fight, and no longer wanted to fight.
She was beaten, but the strange thing was that she did not care. Only,
she would not be pitied. As the days went on she resented the pity that
had kept her in ignorance for so long, and had let her wear her heart on
her sleeve; and she even wondered sometimes whether the story of Dick's
loss of memory had not been false, evolved out of that pity and the
desire to save her pain.
David sent for her, but she wrote him a little note, formal and
restrained. She would come in a day or two, but now she must get her
bearings. He was, to know that she was not angry, and felt it all for
the best, and she was very lovingly his, Elizabeth.
She knew now that she would eventually marry Wallie Sayre if only to get
away from pity. He would have to know the truth about her, that she did
not love any one; not even her father and her mother. She pretended to
care for fear of hurting them, but she was actually frozen quite hard.
She did not believe in love. It was a terrible thing, to be avoided
by any one who wanted to get along, and this avoiding was really quite
simple. One simply stopped feeling.
On the Sunday after she had come to this comfortable knowledge she sat
in the church as usual, in the choir stalls, and suddenly she hated the
church. She hated the way the larynx of Henry Wallace, the tenor, stuck
out like a crabapple over his low collar. She hated the fat double chin
of the bass. She hated the talk about love and the certain rewards of
virtue, and the faces of the congregation, smug and sure of salvation.