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Updated: June 4, 2025
She thanked me, but there was no warmth in the thanks. "I am not well," she said; "but that need make no difference. I presume you and this this lady are prepared to make a definite proposition to me. I am well enough to hear it." Hephzy and I looked at each other. I looked for help, but Hephzy's expression was not helpful at all. It might have meant anything or nothing. "Miss Morley," I began.
I found a cab at the next corner and, bidding the driver take me to Bancroft's, threw myself back on the cushions. This was a lovely mess! This was a beautiful climax to the first act no, merely the prologue of the drama of Hephzy's and my pilgrimage. What would Jim Campbell say to this? I was to be absolutely care-free; I was not to worry about myself or anyone else.
There I read it again and again. And, as I read, the meaning of Hephzy's last sentence, that the letter might help me to decide what was best to do, began to force itself upon my overwrought brain. I began to understand what she had understood from the first, that my trip to London was hopeless, absolutely useless yes, worse than useless.
She laughed at Hephzy's and my American accent and idioms, but when Bayliss, Junior, or one of the curates ventured to criticize an "Americanism" she was quite as likely to declare that she thought it "jolly" and "so expressive." Against my will I was obliged to join in conversations, to take sides in arguments, to be present when callers came, to make calls.
We entered the harbor, where the great crucifix on the hill above the town attracted Hephzy's attention and the French signs over the doors of hotels and shops by the quay made her realize, so she said, that we really were in a foreign country. "Somehow England never did seem so very foreign," she said.
All of Captain Barnabas's own money and all intrusted to his care, including my little nest-egg, had gone as margins to the brokers who had bought for Morley his worthless eight per cent. wildcats. Hephzy's few thousands in the savings bank and elsewhere were all that was left. I shall condense the rest of the miserable business as much as I can.
Another obsession of Hephzy's was travel. She, who had never been further from Bayport than Hartford, Connecticut, was forever dreaming of globe-trotting. It was not a new disease with her, by any means; she had been dreaming the same things ever since I had known her, and that is since I knew anything. Some day, SOME day she was going to this, that and the other place.
I had read, in books by English writers, of the British middle-class Pharisee. I judged the Crippses to be Pharisees. Hephzy's opinion was like mine. "If ever there was a sanctimonious hypocrite it's that Mrs. Cripps," she declared. "And her husband ain't any better. They remind me of Deacon Hardy and his wife back home.
Gradually I began to understand that the rattle and squeak were external and I was in some sort of vehicle, a sleeping car apparently, for I seemed to be lying down. I tried to rise and ask a question and a hand was laid on my forehead and a voice the voice which I had decided was Hephzy's said, gently: "Lie still. You mustn't move. Lie still, please. We shall be there soon."
You needn't say you won't, for I know you too well. Mercy sakes! do you suppose I've taken care of you all these years and DON'T know?" The next forenoon I said good-by to her and the Heptons at the railway station. Hephzy's last words to me were these: "Remember," she said, "if you do get caught in the rain, there's dry things in the lower tray of your trunk.
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