To-night, she lacked the name to label her mood by, rejecting rather
fiercely the one that kept offering itself. You couldn't be homesick when
home was the last place in the world you wanted to go back to--the place
you were desperately marshaling reasons for staying away from.

It was the non-appearance of her brother, Rush, that had brought a lot of
dispersed feelings to a focus. She had heard nothing later from him than
the letter she referred to when she last wrote to her father. She had
expected a cable and it hadn't come. She had this morning gone over to
Hoboken to meet the transport he had said he expected to sail on, but
having got down to the pier a little late, after the debarkation had
begun, she could not be sure that she hadn't missed him. So she had gone
back to her tiny flat in Waverly Place and had spent the rest of the day
there, vainly hoping that he would turn up or at least that she should
get some word of him. And sitting around like that for hours and hours
she had, which was a silly thing to do, let her thoughts run wild over
things--a thing--that there was simply no sense in thinking about at all.

It was an odd fact, which she had noted long before today, that anything
connected with home, a letter from her father or her aunt, news of the
doings of any of her Chicago friends (the birth of Olive Corbett's second
baby, for example), any vivid projection of a bit of the pattern of the
life into which she had once been woven, roused that nightmare memory. Or
gave, rather, to a memory which normally did not trouble her much, the
quality of a nightmare; a moment of paralyzed incredulity that it could
have happened to her; a pang of clear horror that it really and truly had
happened to her very self; to this Mary Wollaston who still lived in the
very place where it had happened.