Explore "Hermia Suydam" by Gertrude Atherton on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Hermia was in bed one morning when her maid brought her the papers. She opened one, then sat suddenly erect, and the paper shook in her hands. She read the headlines through twice-details were needless. Then she dropped the paper and fell back on the pillows. A train had gone over an embankment in the South, and Ogden Cryder's name was in the list of dead.
She lay staring at the painted canopy of her bed. It seemed to her that with Cryder's life her past was annihilated, that the man took with him every act and deed of which she had been a part. A curtain seemed to roll down just behind her. A drama had been enacted, but it was over. What had it been about? She had forgotten. She could recall nothing. That curtain shut out every memory.