From that beginning she had gone on and on, until her legs were tired and her mother was dead and her heart was broken. She had, no matter how impossible it seemed from moment to moment, gone on without love or money, always wondering when it would begin, the splendid end to match the splendid beginning.

She no longer dwelled on the past. She had no fond memories there, except for the single rainbow, the pot of gold. She had bitten and bludgeoned her way through life, angry, fighting in a rage for the next good thing to happen. It hadn’t happened yet. So that, on the day she suddenly realized that her life was, in fact, her life, she wondered what it could possibly have been that led her forward, day after day, what events could possibly have happened to fill the hours between sleep and sleep. But at moments like this, when everything was so quiet she could notice the trembling of her earrings, she knew with dread that the answer was not nothing much, but simply nothing.

She would not, could not live without love or money.

She would remember those faceless young soldiers forever. They would be forever young. She would cherish the glory of the sun coming through the clouds, and the rainbow. Her mother’s loveliness would never abandon her. But what good did it do? What use was all that to her now, sitting in front of a mirror on a train going to the middle of nowhere, on the tightrope between the beginning and the end?

There was a soft knock on the door. The porter who had brought her meals and turned down her bed leaned his dark handsome face into the compartment. “Station in half an hour, Miss.”

“Thank you,” she said softly, never taking her eyes from the mesmerizing mirror. The door closed and she was alone again.

She had seen Ralph Truitt’s personal advertisement six months before, as she sat at a table with Sunday coffee and the newspaper:

COUNTRY BUSINESSMAN SEEKS RELIABLE WIFE. COMPELLED BY PRACTICAL, NOT ROMANTIC REASONS. REPLY BY LETTER. RALPH TRUITT. TRUITT, WISCONSIN. DISCREET.