late—your coldness has killed my love. And, like one of the old-style villains in a cheap melodrama, I have gloated as I saw you humble while I stood cold and impassive. Oh, yes, Mimi, I’ve gone through all this and more—more than ever a boy of sixteen in love for the first time has suffered.
“Yet I find that despite all I do to pluck you and the memory of you out of my heart I love you more devotedly every day that passes. Take pity, Mimi, just let me talk with you—see you, sit beside you and hear your voice. I know now there’s nothing you can do which can kill my love. I cannot understand why you act as you do—surely you do not hate me completely. If you won’t let me see you, won’t you write me just one little note and tell me why you have acted as you have?”
That night Mimi read the letter over and over again. She knew what it had cost him to write it—to make such confessions of his inability to stop loving her despite all she had done to kill that love. For a long time she sat by the window and gazed out into the quiet street below. The roar of the East Side elevated trains came faintly to her like the gentle rumbles of far-off thunder. One by one the little groups of children playing near at hand dispersed with shrill shouts of parting until the morrow. A slightly chilling breeze from the East River swayed the yellowish silk curtains lazily. Ever and again it bustled through the windows in little gusts that swept in and were gone. She heard leaves of paper on the table behind her blowing to the floor but she made no move to pick them up. Life for her was like that, she thought. Little gusts came and swept her out of life just as she was beginning to find her way about in the new spot where she had been placed. They took her and tossed her about, this way and that, dropping her willy-nilly into some new place, some new situation in which she had to begin all over again the process of adjusting herself.
There was no pity for herself in Mimi’s reflections. She had been flung this way and that, buffeted by winds that often threatened to