It was proof enough of Persis' temperamental youthfulness that she reached the city with as keen a sense of adventure as if she had been a runaway boy following a circus. She went to the modest hotel she had patronized the previous fall and was surprised and flattered when the clerk called her by name.
"Gives a body a home-coming feeling, that does," remarked Persis, as she wrote the cramped signature which so poorly represented her robust personality. "I don't see how you can remember everybody, with folks coming and going all the time."
"There are some people it's easy to remember," replied the clerk gallantly and at the same time with sincerity. Whatever else time erased from the tablets of his memory, he would never forget Persis, and her acquisition of a family. Then he looked at her interrogatively, for Persis had jumped, blotting the register.
"You'll have to excuse me." Persis reached for the blotter. "I saw a name I know and it sort of took my breath." There were but two signatures on the page besides her own, the names of Mrs. Honoria Walsh and Enid Randolph, both of Warren, New York.
"I'll give you room forty-two," said the clerk, taking a key from the hook and nodding to a watchful lad in uniform. "Mrs. Walsh and her niece Miss Randolph are on the same floor. If they are friends of yours—"
"No, I wouldn't say that," Persis interrupted. "It's just that I've heard of 'em before." As she left the elevator on the second floor, two women glided past her, one the portly widow with abundant crêpe who is not easily differentiated, the other a stately girl with blonde hair and a scornfully tilted chin. Instinct told Persis that the latter was Enid.
She enjoyed her first day vastly. She drove some two hundred miles in machines of different makes and listened with keen interest to the arguments proving conclusively that each was superior to all others. Night found her tired, a little homesick for the children, but still happy, nevertheless. She finished her dinner—a good dinner as became a woman of means—and went into the little writing-room off the parlor with the intention of jogging Mary's memory regarding the baby's diet. There was but one person in the room, a young woman with fair hair busily engaged in writing.
Persis sat down at the next desk. She was aware of a marked acceleration of the pulse which to her temperament was far from disquieting.
"Excuse me, but isn't this Miss Enid Randolph?"
"Yes." The young woman looked up from her letter. Though her hair was light, her brows were dark and her air distinctly distant.