CHAPTER XVI
Flora Allen found she was not following the words on the page, and let the book slowly fall shut. As it lay there among her hair-brushes and cold-cream pots, she looked at it with a listless distaste. How sick she was of reading instructive books! She never wanted to see another! She turned sideways in her chair with the gesture of a person about to stand up, but the motive power was not enough, and she continued to sit, one arm hanging over the back of her chair. Why get up? Why do anything more than anything else?
How horribly lonely she was! How horribly empty her room was!
The emptiness echoed in her ears. It was an echo she often heard. She always heard it more or less. She told herself that it was like the emptiness of a long stone corridor along which she seemed to be always hurrying, hoping to come to a door that would let her out into life—the warm, quivering life that other people—women in books for instance—seemed to have.
Now she was tired. She had almost worn herself out in the long flight down the empty passage-way that led from birth to death. She began dreadfully to fear that she would never find a door. Wherever she thought she saw one ajar, it was slammed in her face.
Looking back, how she envied her earlier rebellious unhappy self, bright with the animation of her naïve hatred for Belton and America; quivering with her aspiring cry of "Europe" and "culture!" She had been married almost sixteen years—was it possible! A life-time! A life-time filled with nothing. A life-time spent between Belton and Bayonne! Oh, it wasn't fair! She had never had a chance—never! And soon it would be too late for her chance!
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