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Rh to recall him now it was chiefly his loose-fitting clothes she saw, and his stoop. They didn't trouble her, however. Even the thought of him sleeping in that dark hole with the greasy Portuguese didn't trouble her. Did he wear her ring still about his neck, she wondered? Queer to be married to a man like that. Queerer still not to be afraid of it any more.

It was this amazing callousness, Reba supposed, that made it possible for women whose spirits have been broken, to enter convents. Reba's marriage was her convent. What difference to her what particular hardships awaited her inside its walls? She wouldn't suffer from them. She was beyond suffering. She was insensible, as if she had been soaked in cocain. Why, by the time she mailed her note, she was able to march her thoughts straight up to Chadwick Booth, or Nathaniel Cawthorne, either one, and feel neither hurt nor fear.