One day, many black cakes, teas, and intimate revelations later, Susan suddenly announces that she has accepted a position teaching mathematics at Robert Archer's school for girls in Baltimore. Your stomach churns as she excitedly tells you that she made this decision so suddenly that she astonished everyone she knows. Barely able to string a coherent sentence together, you stiltedly tell her to consider yourself a member of this astonished audience. The mere anticipation of losing Susan so soon after you found her—if only for a year-- takes your breath away. You consider pushing her away even before her departure, to spare yourself the pain of being left behind in Amherst; but in the next breath, you hear yourself promising to write to her while she is away.

"For what shall separate us from any whom we love—'not hight nor depth,' dear Susie," you declare as you pull away, anxious to escape to the solitude of your bedroom.

Susan will not meet your eyes; she knows that she has devastated you.

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