And girls who had never been kissed hinted, with
shocked expressions on their plain but not particularly wholesome faces,
that Gloria had. Then these girls had gone east or west or south,
married and become "people," prophesying, if they prophesied about
Gloria, that she would come to a bad end--not knowing that no endings
were bad, and that they, like her, were by no means the mistresses of
their destinies.
Gloria told over to herself the people who had visited them in the gray
house at Marietta. It had seemed at the time that they were always
having company--she had indulged in an unspoken conviction that each
guest was ever afterward slightly indebted to her. They owed her a sort
of moral ten dollars apiece, and should she ever be in need she might,
so to speak, borrow from them this visionary currency. But they were
gone, scattered like chaff, mysteriously and subtly vanished in essence
or in fact.
By Christmas, Gloria's conviction that she should join Anthony had
returned, no longer as a sudden emotion, but as a recurrent need. She
decided to write him word of her coming, but postponed the announcement
upon the advice of Mr.
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