Contrary Mary

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.