We sent her the money she needed, Billy and I, but in her next letter she said that George had escaped from the hospital and that she hadn't heard of him since.

That must have been about six months ago." "It's dreadful for his mother," observed Gabriella, with vague compassion, for she felt as if Patty were speaking of a stranger whose face she was incapable of visualizing in her memory.

In the last ten years she had not only forgotten George, but she had forgotten as completely the Gabriella who had once loved him.

Though it was still possible for her to revoke the hollow images of the past, she could not restore to these images even the remotest semblance of reality and passion.

It was as if some nerve--the sentimental nerve--had atrophied.
She could remember George as she remembered the house in Fifty-seventh Street or her wedding-gown which Miss Polly had made; she could say to herself, "I loved him when I married him," or, "It was in such a year that he left me"; but the empty phrases awoke no responsive echoes in her heart; and it would have been impossible to imagine a woman less crushed or permanently saddened by the wreck of her happiness.