oco pinnacle of
man's accomplishment.

Strolling the edge of that park so close to the water that she could hear
it seethe in the receding, a policeman finally took to following Mrs. Ross,
his measured tread behind hers, his night-stick rapping out every so often.
She found out a bench then, and never out of his view, sat looking out
across the infinitude of blackness to where the bay so casually meets the
sea. Night dampness had sent her shivering, the plumage of her hat, the
ferny feathers of the bird-of-paradise, drooping almost grotesquely over
the brim.

A small detachment of Boy Scouts, sturdy with an enormous sense of uniform
and valor, marched through the asphalt alleys of the park with trained,
small-footed, regimental precision--small boys with clean, lifted faces. A
fife and drum came up the road.

Rat-a-tat-tat! Rat-a-tat-tat!

High over the water a light had come out--Liberty's high-flung torch.
Watching it, and quickened by the fife and drum to an erect sitting
posture, Mrs. Ross slid forward on her bench, lips opening. The policeman
standing off, rapped twice, and when she rose, almost running toward the
lights of the Elevated station, followed.

Within her apartment on upper Broadway, not even a hall light burned
when she let herself in with her key. At the remote end of the aisle of
blackness a slit of yellow showed beneath the door, behind it the babble of
servants' voices.

She entered with a stealth that was well under cover of those voices,
groping into the first door at her right, feeling round for the wall key,
switching the old rose-and-gold room into immediate light. Stood for a
moment, her plumage drooping damply to her shoulders, blue foulard dress
snagged in two places, her gold mesh bag with the sapphire-and-diamond top
hanging low from the crook of her little finger. A clock ticked with almost
an echo into the rather vast silence.

She entered finally, sidling in among the chairs.

A great mound of gray yarn, uncut skein after uncut skein of it, rose off
the brocade divan, more of them piled in systematic pyramids on three
chairs. She dropped at sight of it to the floor beside the couch, burying
her face in its fluff, grasping it in handfuls, writhing into it. Surges of
merciful sobs came sweeping through and through her.

After a while, with a pair of long amber-colored needles, she fell to
knitting with a fast, even furious ambidexterity, her mouth pursing up with
a driving int