Athalie

On the stoops of all the dwellings, brick or brownstone, people sat;

the men in shirt-sleeves, the young girls bare-headed, and in light

summer gowns. Pianos sounded through open parlour windows; there was

dancing going on somewhere in the block.

Eastward where the street intersected the glare of the dingy avenue, a

policeman stood on fixed post, the electric lights guttering on his

metal-work when he turned. Athalie had laid her cheek on her arms and

closed her eyes, from fatigue, perhaps; perhaps to force back the

tears which, nevertheless, glimmered on her lashes where they lay

close to the curved white cheeks.

Little by little the girl was taking degree after degree in her

post-graduate course, the study of which was man.

And for the first time in her life a new reaction in the laboratory of

experience had revealed to her a new element in her analysis;

bitterness.

Which is akin to resentment. And to these it is easy to ally

recklessness.

* * * * *

There came to her a moment, as she sat huddled there at the window,

when endurance suddenly flashed into a white anger; and she found

herself on her feet, pacing the room as caged things pace, with a sort

of blindly fixed purpose, seeing everything yet looking at nothing

that she passed.

But after this had lasted long enough she halted, gazing about her as

though for something that might aid her. But there was only the room

and the furniture, and Hafiz asleep on a chair; only these and the

crystal sphere on its slim bronze tripod. And suddenly she found

herself on her knees beside it, staring into its dusky transparent

depths, fixing her mind, concentrating every thought, straining every

faculty, every nerve in the one desperate and imperative desire.

But through the crystal's depths there is no aid for those who "see

clearly," no comfort, no answer. She could not find there the man she

searched for--the man for whom her soul cried out in fear, in anger,

in despair. As in a glass, darkly, only her own face she saw,

fire-edged with a light like that which burns deep in black opals.

Prone on the floor at last, her white face framed by her hands, her

eyes wide open in the dark, she finally understood that her clear

vision was of no avail where she herself was concerned; that they who

see clearly can never use that vision to help themselves.

Fiercely she resented it,--the more bitterly because for the first

time in her life she had condescended to any voluntary effort toward

clairvoyance.

Wearily she sat up on the floor and gathered her knees into her arms,

staring at nothing there in the darkness while the slow tears fell.