t with him; but the
red walls and the steam heat in the room sickened her at last, and when
she had bathed and dressed and there seemed nothing left for her to do
except get out her work-bag and begin darning his socks, she decided
that she would put on her hat and go out for a walk. It did not occur to
her to feel hurt by the casual manner in which Oliver had shifted the
responsibility of her presence--partly owing to a personal inability to
take a selfish point of view about anything, and partly because of that
racial habit of making allowances for the male in which she had been
sedulously trained from her infancy.

At the door the porter directed her to Fifth Avenue, and she ventured
cautiously as far as the flowing rivulet at the corner, where she would
probably have stood until Oliver's return, if a friendly policeman had
not observed her stranded helplessness and assisted her over. "How on
earth am I to get back again?" she thought, smiling up at him; and this
anxiety engrossed her so completely that for a minute she forgot to look
at the amazing buildings and the curious crowds that hurried frantically
in their shadows. Then a pale finger of sunlight pointed suddenly across
the high roofs in front of her, and awed, in spite of her preoccupation,
by the strangeness of the scene, she stopped and watched the moving
carriages in the middle of the street and the never ending stream of
people that passed on the wet pavements. Occasionally, while she stood
there, some of the passers-by would turn and look at her with friendly
admiring eyes, as though they found something pleasant in her lovely
wistful face and her old-fashioned clothes; and this pleased her so much
that she lost her feeling of loneliness. It was a kindly crowd, and
because she was young and pretty and worth looking at, a part of the
exhilaration of this unknown life passed into her, and she felt for a
little while as though she belonged to it. The youth in her responded to
the passing call of the streets, to this call which fluted like the
sound of pipes in her blood, and lifted her for a moment out of the
narrow track of individual experience. It was charming to feel that all
these strangers looked kindly upon her, and she tried to show that she
returned their interest by letting a little cordial light shine in her
eyes. For the first time in her life the personal boundaries of sympathy
fell away from her, and she realized, in a fleeting sensation, some