excuse a little gulp of emotion;
which, however, was craftily dissembled.

In due course, rising, Miss Manvers stood and delivered at the
desk of the blond cashier, then, penniless, wandered forth into the
brutal sunshine.

Her homeward way took her up Sixth Avenue, through Thirty-Fourth
Street, and northward on Park Avenue.

She went slowly, wearily, as suited a drudge to whom respite from
drudgery brought no earnest of ease or pleasure. The burning air beat
up into her downcast face from sun-baked stones that scorched through
the soles of her shoddy shoes, and she gulped down acrid mouthfuls of
it rather than breathed.

June was still young, but already summer, like some burly ruffian
shouldering spring aside with her work half done, held the city in the
hollow of a hot and humid hand.

In the mid-afternoon glow, lower Park Avenue owned its personal
atmosphere of somnolent isolation, in strong contrast with the bustle
of proletarian Fourth Avenue at its one extreme and the roar at the
other of traffic-galled Forty-Second Street. Of the residences a few,
whose awninged windows resembled heavy-lidded eyes, overlooked
wayfaring folk with drowsy arrogance; the greater number, with boarded
doors and blinded windows, like mouths and eyes tight shut in
seasonable slumber, ignored the world entirely.

Though she had passed that way twice a day for years on
end--always in consciousness of that aloof spirit informing the
inanimate, and in such resentment thereof as properly rewarded a
studied insolence--never before to-day had Sarah Manvers found the
genius of the neighbourhood so unmitigatedly intolerable. It was with
downright relief that presently she turned from the avenue eastward
and accomplished in the span of one short cross-town block a transit
of the most violent contrasts, from the dull dignity of the socially
eligible, if somewhat _passe_, through a stratum of shabby gentility,
to a region of late years dedicated to the uses of adversity
undisguised.

A few doors short of Lexington Avenue she paused, sighed, turned,
climbed weather-bitten steps to a brownstone entrance, and addressed
herself to three long flights of naked stairs.

She left behind, at the entrance, the dingy parlours of "Mme. Levin,
Modes et Toilettes," on the first landing the wailing-rooms of a
hag-ridden teacher of vocal culture, on the next several dusty
chambers perennially unrented, and gained at the top an open door
whose panels s