UNLIGHTED LAMPS


Mary Cochran went out of the rooms where she lived with her father,
Doctor Lester Cochran, at seven o'clock on a Sunday evening. It was
June of the year nineteen hundred and eight and Mary was eighteen years
old. She walked along Tremont to Main Street and across the railroad
tracks to Upper Main, lined with small shops and shoddy houses, a
rather quiet cheerless place on Sundays when there were few people
about. She had told her father she was going to church but did not
intend doing anything of the kind. She did not know what she wanted to
do. "I'll get off by myself and think," she told herself as she walked
slowly along. The night she thought promised to be too fine to be spent
sitting in a stuffy church and hearing a man talk of things that had
apparently nothing to do with her own problem. Her own affairs were
approaching a crisis and it was time for her to begin thinking
seriously of her future.

The thoughtful serious state of mind in which Mary found herself had
been induced in her by a conversation had with her father on the
evening before. Without any preliminary talk and quite suddenly and
abruptly he had told her that he was a victim of heart disease and
might die at any moment. He had made the announcement as they stood
together in the Doctor's office, back of which were the rooms in which
the father and daughter lived.

It was growing dark outside when she came into the office and found him