It was
unbearable that she should be so utterly alone.
It was a week before she could stay in the apartment with the
probability of remaining dry-eyed. There seemed little in the city that
was amusing. Muriel had been shifted to a hospital in New Jersey, from
which she took a metropolitan holiday only every other week, and with
this defection Gloria grew to realize how few were the friends she had
made in all these years of New York. The men she knew were in the army.
"Men she knew"?--she had conceded vaguely to herself that all the men
who had ever been in love with her were her friends. Each one of them
had at a certain considerable time professed to value her favor above
anything in life. But now--where were they? At least two were dead, half
a dozen or more were married, the rest scattered from France to the
Philippines. She wondered whether any of them thought of her, and how
often, and in what respect. Most of them must still picture the little
girl of seventeen or so, the adolescent siren of nine years before.
The girls, too, were gone far afield. She had never been popular in
school. She had been too beautiful, too lazy, not sufficiently conscious
of being a Farmover girl and a "Future Wife and Mother" in perpetual
capital letters.
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