CHAPTER XVII
Good-By
Nancy had no memory of her actions during the time that elapsed between leaving the studio building and her arrival at her own apartment. She knew that she must have guided Sheila to the beginning of the bus route at the lower end of the square, and as perfunctorily signaled the conductor to let her off at the corner of Fifth Avenue and her own street, but she could never remember having done so. Her first conscious recollection was of the few minutes in Sheila’s room, while she was slipping off the child’s gaiters, in the interval before she gave her over to Hitty for the night. The little girl was still sobbing beneath her breath, though her emotion was by this time purely reflexive.
“I didn’t understand that your mother was living, Sheila,” she said.
“She isn’t very nice,” the little girl said miserably. “We don’t tell any one. She always cries and screams and makes us trouble?”
“Did she live with you in Paris?”
“Only sometimes.”
“Does she do—something that she should not do, Sheila?” Nancy asked, with her mind on inebriety, or drug addiction.
“She just isn’t very nice,” Sheila repeated. “She is histérique; she pounded me with her hands, and hurt me.”
Nancy telephoned to the Inn that she had a headache, and shut herself into her room, without food, to gather her scattered forces. She lay wide-awake all the night through, her mind trying to work its way through the lethargy of shock it had received. She remembered falling down the cellar stairs, when she was a little girl, and lying for hours on the hard stone floor, perfectly serene and calm, without pain, until she tried to do so much as move a little finger or lift an eyelid, when the intolerable nausea would begin. She was calm now, until she made the attempt to think what it was that had so prostrated her, and then the anguish spread through her being and convulsed her with unimaginable distress of mind and body.