"But the mortgage? Wasn't there interest or something to pay on that?"
"Mortgage!" said the colonel, in innocent surprise. "What mortgage?"
Viola looked away from him and murmured something about being mixed up. She saw that he had forgotten the story by which, three years ago, he had accounted to her for the first sudden era of prosperity. She felt, with a dreary indifference, that she did not care where that money had come from. She, at least, had not been put forward as a means of procuring it.
The breathless hurry of their departure, and the quantity of work that accumulates about the breaking up of even so small a household, gave her no time for the indulgence of her own bitter thoughts. The days passed in a turmoil of noise and movement. In a nightmare atmosphere of dust and strange faces she haggled with the Jews from the second-hand stores on Mission Street, listened to their sarcastic comments on the old pieces of furniture she had passed her life among, watched them with dull eyes as they tested the springs of the colonel's chair and rubbed between appraising fingers the curtains his young bride had bought twenty-four years before. At night she crept into her bed, too exhausted for thought, to lose herself in blessed gulfs of sleep.
She was possessed by a wild desire to escape from the house and the city. The scene of her humiliation had become intolerable to her, and deep in her heart lay the terror that if she remained it would be the scene of her downfall. The thought of Gault's reappearance filled her with dread. She was confident of his return, and his return as the conqueror who had gauged her weakness and his own power. All her trust in him had been shattered at a blow. Suddenly he had appeared to her, not as the lover whose highest wish was for her happiness, but as the master, cruel and relentless, the owner who had bought and paid for her. The shame of the thought that she still loved him caused her to bow her face upon her breast, hiding it from the eyes of men and the light of day. All she could whisper in her own justification was the words, "But when I grew to love him I never knew--I never guessed for a minute what he meant."
She wanted to begin all over again, to be another person in another place. The charm of home had vanished from the little house. She longed to put it behind her, to be a different woman from the Viola Reed who once within its narrow walls had known the taste of happiness.