Page:All Kneeling (1928).pdf/206

 be reverent to an exhausting degree, and was only kept in order by the more exhausting means of being led to talk exclusively about himself and his painting. When she said those things that demanded wordless answers, restraint shown by clenched hand or bitten lip, he was increasingly apt to answer literally. She was glad, for both their sakes, that she had been strong enough to decide they should not see each other again. That was not why she was so depressed. She did not know the cause, she could not find a cure.

She was bored with theaters, bored with dinners; she wept when Curtis suggested Florida. In her mother-in-law's box at the opera, lent them week after week, drifting her feather fan through air vibrating with plump Mimi's last farewells, kilted Edgardo's laments, or the love-making of Pinkerton and Cho-Cho-San, she was so bored she could have screamed. Amusements can't help me, she thought. People can't help me. Yet somewhere there must be