New York,
destroyer of delusions and cherished hypocrisies and pretenses,
therefore makes the broadly intelligent of its citizens hardy,
makes the others hard--and between the hardy and hard, between
sense and cynicism, yawns a gulf like that between Absalom and
Dives. Susan, a New Yorker now, had got the habit--in thought,
at least--of seeing things with somewhat less distortion from
the actual. She no longer exaggerated the importance of the
Rod-Susan episode. She saw that in New York, where life is
crowded with events, everything in one's life, except death,
becomes incident, becomes episode, where in regions offering
less to think about each rare happening took on an aspect of
vast importance. The Rod-Susan love adventure, she now saw,
was not what it would have seemed--therefore, would have
been--in Sutherland, but was mere episode of a New York life,
giving its light and shade to a certain small part of the long,
variedly patterned fabric of her life, and of his, not
determining the whole. She saw that it was simply like a bend
in the river, giving a new turn to current and course but not
changing the river itself, and soon left far behind and
succeeded by other bends giving each its equal or greater turn
to the stream.
Rod had passed from her life, and she from his life. Thus she
was free to begin her real career--the stage--if she could. She
went to the suite of offices tenanted by Mr.
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