As she carried it upstairs, the steps creaked under her short, broad, bare feet.
She went into her room. The folded paper was slick and cold. It rattled as she opened it.
Her eyes ran over the columns and the gray print seemed to shift and dance and come together like the broken figures in a kaleidoscope.
Horace Ridge was dead.... She laid the paper on the bed.
The paper seemed a strange thing. The room, the bed, the chairs, were words. What she knew had no word.
She felt exalted—almost happy.
She dressed, and put on her hat, and placed Laurie's pistol in her bag. When she shut the pistol in the bag she had a foolish feeling that she was doing something irrelevant, but her reason told her that she had to have it.
When she opened the front door a second time, she knew that Mamma Farley was up because the milk bottle had been taken in.
The street had been washed, and smelt sweet. A child trundled a baby carriage up and down the block. The carriage went through the wet and left gray, glistening tracks where the concrete had already dried. Some negro workmen in huge clumsy coats and bulging-toed shoes went by.
Alice closed the door softly behind her. She had a vague idea that she would go to the cemetery where Winnie was buried. She would take the train a short distance and walk the rest of the way.