Page:Firecrackers a realistic novel.pdf/137

 habitual propensity of his, she noted, not without annoyance. Campaspe's own temperament forbad her to run away from anything. She was prepared to face whatever came towards her; in most instances, indeed, to welcome it; more, to beckon it excitedly. She had, as a matter of fact, up to this moment, taken the initiative in the precise drama undergoing her present consideration, and so it was with a curious foreboding that she experienced, quite uncharacteristically, this vast sensation of relief in the knowledge of Gunnar's flight, combined with the feeling that his action had preserved her, at least momentarily, from an unknown peril of which she was just a little afraid. Nevertheless, with this sensation of relief came to her simultaneously a glimmering of regret, for there was that unique perversity in her emotional make-up which made her grieve for nothing quite so poignantly as for discarded experience. It was Gunnar, however, who had created the vacuum, if there were a vacuum—sometimes, pondering in an obscure and contradictory reverie, it was given to her to doubt even this—a thought which afforded her sufficient consolation so that, along with whatever other loss she had suffered, she suffered no concomitant loss of self-respect.

Meanwhile the rapidly unwinding panorama of New York life continued to display itself before her somewhat listless perceptions. A tenet of her serviceable philosophy informed her that, if the com-