irly ran out of
the office and down the stairs and across the bridge.

"Which way did that young lady go?" he demanders of the sergeant.

"Why--uh, West Street, Mr. Ditmar."

He remembered where Fillmore Street was; he had, indeed, sought it out
one evening in the hope of meeting her. He hurried toward it now, his
glance strained ahead to catch sight of her figure under a lamp. But he
reached Fillmore Street without overtaking her, and in the rain he stood
gazing at the mean houses there, wondering in which of them she lived,
and whether she had as yet come home....

After leaving Ditmar Janet, probably from force of habit, had indeed gone
through West Street, and after that she walked on aimlessly. It was
better to walk than to sit alone in torment, to be gnawed by that Thing
from which she had so desperately attempted to escape, and failed. She
tried to think why she had failed.... Though the rain fell on her cheeks,
her mouth was parched; and this dryness of her palate, this physical
sense of lightness, almost of dizziness, were intimately yet
incomprehensibly part and parcel of the fantastic moods into which she
floated. It was as though, in trying to solve a problem, she caught
herself from time to time falling off to sleep. In her waking moments she
was terror-stricken. Scarce an hour had passed since, in a terrible
exaltation at having found a solution, she had gone to Ditmar's office in
the mill. What had happened to stay her? It was when she tried to find
the cause of the weakness that so abruptly had overtaken her, or to cast
about for a plan to fit the new predicament to which her failure had
sentenced her, that the fantasies intruded. She heard Ditmar speaking,
the arguments were curiously familiar--but they were not Ditmar's! They
were her father's, and now it was Edward's voice to which she listened,
he was telling her how eminently proper it was that she should marry
Ditmar, because of her Bumpus blood. And this made her laugh.... Again,
Ditmar was kissing her hair. He had often praised it. She had taken it
down and combed it out for him; it was like a cloud, he said--so fine;
its odour made him faint--and then the odour changed, became that of the
detested perfume of Miss Lottie Myers! Even that made Janet smile! But
Ditmar was strong, he was powerful, he was a Fact, why not go back to him
and let him absorb and destroy her? That annihilation would be joy....

It could not have been much later than s