And she packed the huge toy under her arm, along with the iridescent ball and the gewgaws of her plunder, and out into the cab, where an attendant tucked a bottle of the red warming wine between them.
"Ready, Doll?"
"Ready."
The silent storm had continued its silent work, weaving its blanket softer, deeper. The straggling pedestrians of early morning bent their heads into it and drove first paths through the immaculate mantle. The fronts of owl cars and cabs were coated with a sugary white rime. Broadway lay in a white lethargy that is her nearest approach to sleep.
Snow-plows were already abroad clearing tracks, dry snow-dust spinning from under them. At Longacre Square the flakes blew upward in spiral flurries, erratic, full of antics. The cab snorted, plunged, leaped forward. Mr. Fitzgibbons inclined toward the little huddle beside him.
"Sweetness, now I got you! You little sweetness you, now I got you, sweetness!"
"Jimmie! Quit! Quit! You—you old—you—you—"
The breath of a forgotten perfume and associations webby with age stir through the lethargy of years. Memories faded as flowers lift their heads. The frail scent of mignonette roused with the dust of letters half a century old, and eyes too dim and watery to show the glaze of tears turn backward fifty years upon the mignonette-bowered scene of love's young dream. A steel drawing-room car rolling through the clean and heavy stench of cow pasture, and a steady-eyed, white-haired capitalist, rolling on his rolling-stock, leans back against the upholstery and gazes with eyes tight closed upon a steady-eyed, brown-haired youngster herding in at eventide. The whiff of violets from a vender's tray, and a young man dreams above his ledger. The reek of a passing brewer's wagon, and white faces look after, suddenly famished.
When the familiar pungency of her boarding-house flowed in and round Mrs. Violet Smith, she paused for a moment and could not push through the oppression. Then, with the associations of odor crowding in about her, she stripped herself of her gewgaws, as if here even the tarnished tinsel of pleasure could have no place, and tiptoed up the weary wind of three unlighted flights and through the thick staleness of unaired halls.
At the third landing a broom and a dirty tangled debris of scrub-cloths lay on the topmost stair, as if an aching slavey had not found the strength to remove them. They caught the heel of her shoe, pitching her forward so that she fell sharply against her own door. In the gloom she paused for a palpitating moment, her hands pressing her breast, listening; then deposited her laden hat, the little pile of tinsel and the woolen bear on the floor outside the door.