when she had mentioned that someday she would take him with her. She could establish a trust fund with all the money she possessed and insure at least reasonable comfort for him. No, that was impossible—she could never give him up that way.
Night after night she rolled and tossed and came no nearer a solution than before. Her eyes now had dark circles under them, she could not eat, she was nervous and irritable even to the customers. The knowledge that this state of affairs could not go on did not add to her comfort. And Jimmie Forrester would not be denied. He brought his mother to the shop to buy gowns but Mimi would not see them, sending word that she was frightfully busy and terribly sorry. …
Autumn and the rush season were upon her and she still wrestled with the riddle which seemed well-nigh insoluble to her. Mimi’s face had lost much of its colour, deep lines spread fan-like from the corners of her haggard eyes, from her body had gone much of its roundness. To her dismay she found that the more she struggled against the love which she feared, the more securely did it fasten its tentacles upon her. With her now was a stifling, strangling sensation as though she were held in the rib-cracking embrace of a boa constrictor who was crushing her in a room filled with acrid smoke. The passage of days and weeks and months had neither lessened her own distress, blissful in a measure though it was, nor had Jimmie Forrester’s zeal shown any sign of abatement. He resorted to telegrams, flowers, books. He used the mails to send proud but pleading letters asking her to permit him only to see her, to walk with her in the park, to go to the theatre or dinner. “Undoubtedly I’ve made myself a silly ass in your eyes,” he wrote her, “pursuing you, bombarding you, besieging you. My common sense tells me I should have taken refuge in pride and shown you that I can become angry enough never to see you again. I’ve even gone as far as to construct in my own mind little dramatic scenes when I loftily told you, after you had seen the devotion I offer you and had returned it in kind, that it was too