The summer slipped by, monotonously hot, languidly humid. And it was
on these hot and humid days that Mary felt the grind of her new
occupation. She grew to dread her entrance into the square close
office room, with its gaunt desks and its unchanging occupants. She
waxed restless through the hours of confinement, escaping thankfully at
the end of a long day.
She longed for a whiff of the sea, for the deeps of some forest, for
the fields of green which must be somewhere beyond the blue-gray haze
which had settled over the shimmering city.
She began to show the effects of her unaccustomed drudgery. She grew
pale and thin. Aunt Isabelle was worried. The two women sat much by
the fountain. Mary had begged Aunt Isabelle to go away to some cooler
spot. But the gentle lady had refused.
"This is home to me, my dear," she had said, "and I don't mind the
heat. And there's no happiness for me in big hotels."
"There'd be happiness for me anywhere that I could get a breath of
coolness," Mary said, restlessly. "I can hardly wait for the fall
days."
Yet when the cooler days came, there was the dreariness of rain and of
sighing winds. And now it was November, and Roger Poole had been away
a year.
The garden was dead, and Mary was glad. Dead gardens seemed to fit
into her mood better than those which bloomed. Resolutely she set
herself to be cheerful; conscientiously, she told herself that she must
live up to the theories which she had professed; sternly, she called
herself to account that she did not exult in the freedom which she had
craved. Constantly her mind warred with her heart, and her heart won;
and she faced the truth that all seasons would be dreary without Roger
Poole.
Her letters to him of late had lacked the spontaneity which had at
first characterized them. She knew it, and tried to regain her old
sense of ease and intimacy. But the doubts which Porter had planted
had borne fruit. Always between her and Roger floated the vision of
the little saint in red.
It was inevitable that Roger's letters should change. He ceased to
show her the side which for a time he had so surprisingly revealed.
Their correspondence became perfunctory--intermittent.
"It is my own fault," Mary told herself, yet the knowledge did not make
things easier.
And now began the winter of her discontent. If any one had told her in
her days of buoyant self-confidence that she would ever go to bed weary
and wake up hopeless, she would have scorned the idea; yet the fact
remained that the fruit of her independence was Dead Sea apples.