Diverging roads

There is a peculiar quality in the somnolence of an old town in which little has occurred for many years. It is the unease of relaxation without repose, the unease of one who li...

She had tried to do her hair in a new way, putting it up in rag curlers the night before, working with it for hours that morning in the stuffy attic bedroom before the wavy mirr...

She came down the road again a little after seven o'clock. It was another cold night, and the stars glittered frostily in a sky almost as black as the hills. The road lost itsel...

The thought of Paul was the one clear reality in Helen's life while she blundered through the bewilderments of the first months in Sacramento. It was the only thing that warmed...

The next day she dressed very carefully in a fresh white waist and her Indianhead skirt and went down to the telegraph-office to ask for a job. She knew where to find the office...

When the train pulled into the big, dingy station Helen had been waiting for some time, her pulses fluttering with excitement. But her self-confidence deserted her when she saw...

She woke with a start at the sound of the alarm. Her sleep had not refreshed her. Her body felt wooden, and there was a gritty sensation behind her eyeballs. Dressing and hurryi...

Cooped in a narrow space at the end of a long corridor, Helen sat gazing at the life of a great San Francisco hotel. Every moment the color and glitter shifted under the brillia...

In the mornings Helen went to work. The first confusion of the Merchants' Exchange had cleared a little. She began to see a pattern in the fluctuations of the market quotations....

It had been a hard day at the office. A mistake had been made in a message, and a furious broker, asserting that it had cost him thousands of dollars, that she was at fault, tha...

At ten o'clock on a bright June morning Helen Kennedy tip-toed across a darkened bedroom and closed its door softly behind her. Her tenseness relaxed with a sigh of relief when...

Bert was not in the apartment when she reached it; she knew her disappointment was irrational, for she had told herself he would not be there. However, he might telephone. She c...

Morning came like a change in an interminable delirium. Light poured in through the open window, and the smothering heat of the night gave way to the burning heat of the day. He...

Very early Tuesday morning she drove to the Limited lease and got MacAdams. He looked formidable in his good clothes, and now that he had shaved the scrubby gray beard his chin...

During the weeks that followed she felt that she was moving in a dream, a shadow among unrealities. She drove across endless yellow plains that wavered in the heat. The lines we...

Returning to Coalinga after the meeting with Paul, Helen ached with weariness. But she was alive again. The haze in which she had been existing was gone. She had risen early tha...

On a hot July afternoon three years later she drove a dusty car through the traffic on Santa Clara Street in San José, and stopped it at the curb. When she had jumped to the sid...

Sleep was impossible. Helen's exhausted nerves reacted in feverish tenseness to the shock of this unexpected news of Bert. From long experience she knew that in this half-deliri...

The shortcake was a triumph when she set it, steaming hot and oozing amber juice, on the table between them. "You certainly are a wonder, Helen!" Paul said, struck by its crumbl...

Two weeks after she left the office her feet took her back to it, as if by volition of their own. The familiar walls, covered with photographs of alfalfa fields and tract maps p...

Paul was aggrieved. He stood in the dismantled living-room of the little bungalow, struggling between forbearance and a sense of the justice of his grievance. "But look here!" h...

"I'm going as a correspondent, of course. I never dreamed that I could pull it off. But the United Press has come through with credentials. Girls, when I get over there, stories...

At the end of a long, warm summer day Helen lay in a hammock swung between two apricot-trees. From time to time, with a light push of a slippered foot on the grass, she set the...

Early on the morning of the nineteenth she climbed the steps to the little brown house on Russian Hill. She had traveled all night from Masonville, awake in her berth, and she w...