As so often had
been the case, her sense of smell worked against her good intentions.
The employment agency smelt as though it had been dead a very long time.
She waited five minutes inspecting her unprepossessing competitors--then
she walked briskly out into the farthest recesses of Central Park and
remained so long that she caught a cold. She was trying to air the
employment agency out of her walking suit.
In the spring she began to gather from Anthony's letters--not from any
one in particular but from their culminative effect--that he did not
want her to come South. Curiously repeated excuses that seemed to haunt
him by their very insufficiency occurred with Freudian regularity. He
set them down in each letter as though he feared he had forgotten them
the last time, as though it were desperately necessary to impress her
with them. And the dilutions of his letters with affectionate
diminutives began to be mechanical and unspontaneous--almost as though,
having completed the letter, he had looked it over and literally stuck
them in, like epigrams in an Oscar Wilde play. She jumped to the
solution, rejected it, was angry and depressed by turns--finally she
shut her mind to it proudly, and allowed an increasing coolness to creep
into her end of the correspondence.
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