"Aha!" in the key of burlesque. "Either I sully these fair lips with alcohol or to-morrow I awake jobless."
He was visibly annoyed, dropping her arm and hurrying past the mirrored entrance.
"You flatter yourself."
She bit into her lips, again with a sense of her ridiculousness, confessing, in her stress and against the old inhibition, to a state of being unwell.
"It isn't that, and you know it! I'm done up these last few days.
Feeling seedy. It must be this Indian-summerish heat."
"Poor pussy!" he said, again good-humored.
It was true that a recurring sense of dizziness would sweep like a sudden wave over her, in street cars, even in bed before she rose mornings, and that very afternoon as she sang into the murky darkness a terrifying sense of it had threatened her.
In the little restaurant in Union Square which she frequented, her healthy young appetite would prompt her to order foods that when they arrived she would suddenly reject. She tried to guard against these nervous recurrences by resolutely permitting no thought of her yesterdays to crop into her to-days. Except, daily, she visited the Public Library, reading over St. Louis newspapers of last week's vintage, and never failing to glance at the death notices. For one week an advertisement under PERSONAL appeared, which every time she encountered it was sure to blur over her vision with quick tears:
Lilly, come home. All is forgiven.
She attributed some of her nervousness to the condition of mind this little paragraph invariably induced. To bear out this conviction she even omitted the visits to the Library for three or four days, but still the flashes of discomfort persisted.