“Reliable wife.” That was new, and she smiled. She had read in her life perhaps thousands of advertisements just like it. It was a hobby of hers, like knitting. She was engrossed by these notices, lonely men who called out from the vast wildernesses of the country. Sometimes the notices were placed by women, who asked for strength or patience or kindness or merely civility.

She laughed at their stories, at their pitiful foolhardiness. They asked and probably found somebody as lonely and desperate as themselves. How could they expect more? The halt and the lame calling the blind and hopeless. Catherine found it hilarious.

She assumed, still, that these men and these women found each other through their sad little calls for comfort. They found, if not love or money, at least another life to cling to. Advertisements like this one appeared every week. These people didn’t like the solitude of their lives. Perhaps they, at least some of them, eventually found lives they liked better.

The night before, just before she slept, she suddenly saw herself as if from above, lying in her bed, the chill of loneliness and death all around her like a nimbus of disconsolation. She hovered in the air, watching herself. She had felt, and still felt that she would die unless someone could find the sweetness to touch her with affection. Unless someone would appear to shelter her from the storm of her awful life.

It was Ralph Truitt’s terse announcement, containing the promise of a beginning, not splendid, perhaps, but new, that she had finally answered. “I am a simple, honest woman,” she had written, and he had answered by return mail. They had written all through the hot summer, tentative descriptions of their lives. His handwriting was blunt and compelling, hers practiced and elegant, she hoped, and seductive. She had at last sent the photograph, and he had written at greater length, as though it were already decided, the whole match. She had feigned hesitation, until he insisted and sent her a ticket for the train to come and bring her to be his wife.