atefully at Miss Kilroy, but neither knew what more to say.
Lily was aware that the other was on the point of offering to go home
with her, but she wanted to be alone and silent--even kindness, the sort
of kindness that Miss Kilroy could give, would have jarred on her just
then.

"Thank you," she repeated as she turned away.

She struck westward through the dreary March twilight, toward the street
where her boarding-house stood. She had resolutely refused Gerty's offer
of hospitality. Something of her mother's fierce shrinking from
observation and sympathy was beginning to develop in her, and the
promiscuity of small quarters and close intimacy seemed, on the whole,
less endurable than the solitude of a hall bedroom in a house where she
could come and go unremarked among other workers. For a while she had
been sustained by this desire for privacy and independence; but now,
perhaps from increasing physical weariness, the lassitude brought about
by hours of unwonted confinement, she was beginning to feel acutely the
ugliness and discomfort of her surroundings. The day's task done, she
dreaded to return to her narrow room, with its blotched wallpaper and
shabby paint; and she hated every step of the walk thither, through the
degradation of a New York street in the last stages of decline from
fashion to commerce.

But what she dreaded most of all was having to pass the chemist's at the
corner of Sixth Avenue. She had meant to take another street: she had
usually done so of late. But today her steps were irresistibly drawn
toward the flaring plate-glass corner; she tried to take the lower
crossing, but a laden dray crowded her back, and she struck across the
street obliquely, reaching the sidewalk just opposite the chemist's door.

Over the counter she caught the eye of the clerk who had waited on her
before, and slipped the prescription into his hand. There could be no
question about the prescription: it was a copy of one of Mrs. Hatch's,
obligingly furnished by that lady's chemist. Lily was confident that the
clerk would fill it without hesitation; yet the nervous dread of a
refusal, or even of an expression of doubt, communicated itself to her
restless hands as she affected to examine the bottles of perfume stacked
on the glass case before her.

The clerk had read the prescription without comment; but in the act of
handing out the bottle he paused.

"You don't want to increase the dose, you know," he remarked. Lil