e had
gone to get it, before anything had happened and the lure of life had
been so exquisite. Now that it had come near--if this indeed were life
that she was laboring in--it was steep and crabbed, like the brown hills
in summer, far off, like velvet, to climb, plowed ground and stubble.

And yet she didn't wish herself back, but only forward. Now she had no
leisure to imagine, to pretend, to enjoy, only the breathless sense
that she must get forward. The chattering clock on her mantel warned her
of the passing time and set her hurrying into her walking-gown, her hat,
her gloves, as if the object of her errand would only wait for her a
moment longer. When, for the second time, she opened the house door, she
didn't hesitate. She descended into the white fog that covered all the
city.

Above her the stone facade of her house loomed huge and pinkish in the
mist. Her spirits rose with the feeling that she was going adventuring
again, leaving that house where for the last two days she had awaited
events with such vivid apprehensions. She hurried fast down the damp,
glistening pavement, seeing long, dim gray faces of houses glimmer by,
seeing figures come toward her through the fog, grow vivid, pass, and
hearing at intervals the hoarse, lonely voice of the fog-horn at "The
Heads" reaching her over many intervening hills. She did not feel sure
what she should do at the end of her journey or what awaited her there.
She knew herself a most unpractised hunter, she, who, all her life, had
been the most artful of quarries. A quarry she was still, but in this
chase she had to come out and stalk the facts in order to see which way
to run; if, she told herself in her exhilaration, she decided to run at
all.

She turned in at the low gate of imitation grill in front of an enormous
wooden mansion, with towers and cupolas painted all a chill slate gray,
with fuchsias, purple and red, clambering up the front. She rang, and
was admitted into a hall, ornate and very high, with a wide staircase
sweeping down into the middle of it.

The maid looked dubiously at Flora and thought Miss Buller was not at
home, but would see. Flora turned into the room on her left and sat down
among the Louis Quinze sofas and potted palms with a feeling that Miss
Buller was at home, and, for one reason or another, preferred not to be
seen. She waited apprehensively, wondering whether Ella was not seeing
the world-in-general, or had really specified against h