Under the stainless blue of the sky, it seemed to her that the winter's earth was suddenly quickening with the seeds of the spring.
In the Waldorf she found a corner which was deserted, except for an elderly man with a dried face and a girl in a green hat, who appeared to be writing to her lover; and sitting down at a little desk behind a lamp, she wrote to her mother without mentioning George, without explaining anything, without even making excuses for her failure to keep her promise.

She knew now that George had never meant that her mother should live with them, that he had never meant that they should take an apartment, that he had lied to her, without compunction, from the beginning.

She knew this as surely as she knew that he was faithless and selfish, as surely as she knew that he had ceased to love her and would never love her again.

And this knowledge, which had once caused her such poignant agony, seemed now as detached and remote as any tragedy in ancient history.

She was barely twenty-two, and her love story had already dwindled to an impersonal biographical interest in her mind.
When she had finished her letter, she placed the check inside of it, and then sat for a minute pensively watching the girl in the green hat, whose face paled and reddened while she wrote to her lover.
"It seems a hundred years ago since I felt like that," she thought, "and now it is all over." Then because melancholy had no part in her nature, and she was too practical to waste time in useless regrets, she rose quickly from the desk, and went out, while the exhilaration of her mood was still proof against the dangerous weakness of self-pity.