She never opened
one of those dearly familiar envelopes without the irrepressible hope
that it contained a love-letter; a passionate demand that she come back
to him; leave all she had and come back to him; his woman to her man.
And her disappointment and inconsistency bewildered her.
Her two chance encounters, first with Jimmy Wallace in the theater, and
later with James Randolph, made her restlessness more nearly
unendurable. The thought that they were going back to Chicago and would,
no doubt, within a few days after their talks with her, see and talk
with him, was like the cup of Tantalus. And if she could encounter them
by chance, like that, why mightn't she encounter him? Why mightn't he
come to New York on business? She never walked anywhere, nowadays,
without watching for him.
She didn't yield, passively, to these thoughts and feelings. She fought
them relentlessly, methodically. She went to a women's gymnasium every
evening, threw a medicine ball around for a while, and then played a
hard game of squash, in the sometimes successful attempt to get tired
enough so that she'd have to sleep.
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