He had no relatives except
cousins more or less removed, and they would have
nothing to do with him.
There had been a woman whom he had meant to
marry, and he had been sure that she would marry
him; but after he had been a year in prison the
news had come to him in a roundabout fashion that
she had married another suitor. Even had she re-
mained single he could not have approached her,
least of all for aid. Then, too, through all his term
she had made no sign, there had been no letter, no
message; and he had received at first letters and
flowers and messages from sentimental women.
There had been nothing from her. He had accepted
nothing, with the curious patience, carrying an odd
pleasure with it, which had come to him when the
prison door first closed upon him. He had not for-
gotten her, but he had not consciously mourned
her. His loss, his ruin, had been so tremendous that
she had been swallowed up in it. When one's
whole system needs to be steeled to trouble and pain,
single pricks lose importance. He thought of her
that day without any sense of sadness. He imagined
her in a pretty, well-ordered home with her husband
and children. Perhaps she had grown stout. She
had been a slender woman. He tried idly to imagine
how she would look stout, then by the sequence of
self-preservation the imagination of stoutness in an-
other led to the problem of keeping the covering
of flesh and fatness upon his own bones.
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