ime of night, and there telephone the doctor.

She was aware that it was raining, for the fire-escape outside shone wet
in the light from a window across the narrow court. She discovered she
had left mackintosh and umbrella at the office. Stopping only to set out
a clean towel, a spoon, and a glass on the chair by the bed, Una put on
the old sweater which she secretly wore under her cheap thin jacket in
winter. She lumbered wearily down-stairs. She prayed confusedly that God
would give her back her headache and in reward make her mother well.

She was down-stairs at the heavy, grilled door. Rain was pouring. A
light six stories up in the apartment-house across the street seemed
infinitely distant and lonely, curtained from her by the rain. Water
splashed in the street and gurgled in the gutters. It did not belong to
the city as it would have belonged to brown woods or prairie. It was
violent here, shocking and terrible. It took distinct effort for Una to
wade out into it.

The modern city! Subway, asphalt, a wireless message winging overhead,
and Una Golden, an office-woman in eye-glasses. Yet sickness and rain
and night were abroad; and it was a clumsily wrapped peasant woman,
bent-shouldered and heavily breathing, who trudged unprotected through
the dark side-streets as though she were creeping along moorland paths.
Her thought was dulled to everything but physical discomfort and the
illness which menaced the beloved. Woman's eternal agony for the sick of
her family had transformed the trim smoothness of the office-woman's
face into wrinkles that were tragic and ruggedly beautiful.

Sec. 7

Again Una climbed the endless stairs to her flat. She unconsciously
counted the beat of the weary, regular rhythm which her feet made on the
slate treads and the landings--one, two, three, four, five, six, seven,
landing, turn and--one, two, three, four, five, six, seven--over and
over. At the foot of the last flight she suddenly believed that her
mother needed her this instant. She broke the regular thumping rhythm of
her climb, dashed up, cried out at the seconds wasted in unlocking the
door. She tiptoed into the bedroom--and found her mother just as she had
left her. In Una's low groan of gladness there was all the world's
self-sacrifice, all the fidelity to a cause or to a love. But as she sat
unmoving she came to feel that her mother was not there; her being was
not in this wreck upon the bed.

In an hour the doctor so