Was it possible, she asked herself now, as she went back to the kitchen to stew the oysters Miss Polly had bought for supper, that the kindly doctor was misinterpreting the simple and unaffected nature of her friendship?
For herself she felt that she had put the reality of love out of her life, and that if the emotion existed for her at all, it existed only as a dream and a regret.

She enshrined the memory of Arthur in something of the sentimental worship which Mrs.Carr had consecrated to Gabriel after she had lost him.

It was an exquisite consolation to her to feel that if things had been otherwise, she might have loved a man with the whole of her nature--with both body and spirit; there were even moments in the spring of the year, when, softened by the caressing air and the scent of hyacinths, she felt that she did so love a memory; but beyond this her feeling was as bodiless and ethereal as the vague image to which it was dedicated.

And yet this gentle regret was all that she wanted of love.
In the kitchen she found Miss Danton, the musical spinster, making her scant supper of tea and toast on the gas-range.

Though the hectic flush still burned in Miss Danton's cheeks, the famished look in her eyes seemed to have devoured all the strength of her body, and she moved like one who has run to the point of exhaustion and is about to drop to the ground.