Barely two weeks later, in October, Cal wrote to Elizabeth that he felt “torn apart,” but that state was preferable to being obliged to make a decision.14 “After all I have done, can I go back to you and Harriet?” He didn’t think so. He could not “weigh the dear, troubled past . . . in which you saved everything” against a future with Caroline. And yet, he wrote, “allow me this short space before I arrive in New York to wobble in my mind.” He planned to visit New York at Christmas with his new love, comparing his feeling for her to his feeling for Elizabeth when they were at Yaddo. She wrote to Blair that she didn’t believe Caroline would come with him (“This is his fantasy”), and that he was probably afraid to leave without her, because “she might not be there when he got back.”15 He did not seem to realize that he would never see Elizabeth again after this visit, when he needed to “settle up things, make arrangements and then leave forever.” (In a phone conversation, Elizabeth had told Blair that if Caroline accompanied Cal on this trip, she planned to leave town.) But maybe he wouldn’t come after all. “In all the months he has been gone,” she confided, “I’ve heard from him a lot and he has never answered one question that I have put to him, or discussed really anything . . . except himself.” What especially irritated her, she told Mary, was “that terrible breeziness and casualness about the deepest feelings of your own life, and also of his own.”16 She described him as “such a childish torturer—that little side look of malice he gives you—and so spooky, more and more.”17