in my memory, as though during it I had peered too close into the face of
life. And now I had undertaken another, and a longer one. Three months
had elapsed--three months of growing misery and despair; three months of
tedious familiarity with lawyers and distant relatives, and all the
exasperating camp-followers of death; three months of secret and strange
fear, waxing daily. And at last, amid the expostulations and the shrugs
of wisdom and age, I had decided to go to London. I had little energy,
and no interest, but I saw that I must go to London; I was driven there
by my secret fear; I dared not delay. And not a soul in the wide waste of
the Five Towns comprehended me, or could have comprehended me had it been
so minded. I might have shut up the house for a time. But no; I would
not. Always I have been sudden, violent, and arbitrary; I have never been
able to tolerate half-measures, or to wait upon occasion. I sold the
house; I sold the furniture. Yes; and I dismissed my faithful Rebecca
and the clinging Lucy, and they departed, God knows where; it was as
though I had sold them into slavery. Again and again, in the final week,
I cut myself to the quick, recklessly, perhaps purposely; I moved in a
sort of terrible languor, deaf to every appeal, pretending to be stony,
and yet tortured by my secret fear, and by a hemorrhage of the heart that
no philosophy could stanch. And I swear that nothing desolated me more
than the strapping and the labelling of my trunks that morning after I
had slept, dreamfully, in the bed that I should never use again--the bed
that, indeed, was even then the property of a furniture dealer. Had I
wept at all, I should have wept as I wrote out the labels for my trunks:
'Miss Peel, passenger to Golden Cross Hotel, London. Euston via Rugby,'
with two thick lines drawn under the 'Euston.' That writing of labels was
the climax. With a desperate effort I tore myself up by the roots, and
all bleeding I left the Five Towns. I have never seen them since. Some
day, when I shall have attained serenity and peace, when the battle has
been fought and lost, I will revisit my youth. I have always loved