Chapter 17, Natalie
After the funeral, the family returned to the Fifth Avenue house.
Though I took up a permanent abode elsewhere, my apartment was still there, and I came and went almost as one of the household.
The more I saw of Natalie, the stranger and more distant she was.
Her behavior was incomprehensible.
She was friendly, often tender, always solicitous, but kept a wall of constraint between us.
and Business.
She positively refused to talk of our engagement and came to the point where she denied there
was any such thing.
When I proposed to cure that difficulty in a very obvious way, she took refuge in fits
of perverse and willful unreasonableness.
She would spend a whole evening in some inaccessible mood and become herself only for an instant
at the last.
Suddenly they resolved to travel.
She persuaded her mother to it.
When we won't see Coxie for a long, long time, she said, one evening at dinner, and maybe
he will miss us.
They went around the world.
Her letters were friendly, sprightly, teasing, and very unsatisfactory.
She would not be serious.
At last, Galt's posthumous affairs began to settle so that I could leave them, and I immediately
set out in a westerly direction, intending to meet Mrs. Galt and Natalie in the Orient
on surprise.
I missed them in China because they had revised their schedule and gone to Japan.
In Japan, I missed them again because they were suddenly homesick and cut their sojourn
shortly.
We crossed the Pacific a week apart.
They stopped only four days in San Francisco, so I missed them there.
Then I telegraphed Natalie what I had been doing.
Four months had passed without a word of news between us.
When arriving in New York, I went directly to the Fifth Avenue house.
As I rang the bell, a feeling of desolation assailed me.
The absurd thought rose that she somehow knew of my pursuit and had purposely defeated it.
She was downstairs, sitting alone before the fireplace in the reception hall, reading.
She dropped her book and ran toward me, rather at me, slid the last ten feet of it with her
The End