If she had thought of the matter at all, she would have thought twice about going so shabbily clad to call at a grand house. But she didn't think. She felt as if she was doing nothing of her own accord. Strange, mysterious powers were pushing her hither and thither, like a pawn on a chessboard. Unseen hands helped her to dress. They loosened the plaits on her neck, unfastened the tight buttons of her coat so that her contracted chest should have room to show its young contour, and painted her cheeks, wan from want of sleep, with a rich glow of excitement and triumph.
Not till she stepped out into the frosty air did she feel properly awake.
"Where do you want to go?" a voice asked within her, "I might go and see St. Joseph," she answered herself.
But she did not go to St. Joseph. She made a wide circuit round St. Ann's, crossed the market-place, where she saw the Asmussen sisters sitting in Frangipani's with two admirers, escaped a gallant follower with difficulty, and then suddenly found herself in front of the latticed shutters of the house where, up four flights of stairs, the whirring sewing-machine had ground the last shred of reason out of her poor, ruined mother's head.
There was a light in the windows of the attic where she had once lived. Probably someone else sat there now, slaving day and night, night and day, at the drudgery of making cheap underclothes. Perhaps one day she too would sit there, regretting bitterly her lost youth, as if it had been a crime.
"If you have your future at heart," he had written.
And now she turned and ran--ran for her life, and didn't stop till she stood on the threshold of a brilliantly lighted house, before which a freezing sentinel with drawn sabre paced up and down, as he kept guard over the most important dignitary of the town.
"Where are you going?" asked the voice again. For answer she sprang up the wide carpeted stairway and ran into a lackey with silver braid on his knee-breeches. Without speaking, he quietly took her umbrella, while a slight malicious smile flitted over his imperturbable countenance.
Softly, white doors flew back before her, lights with rosy shades like magic flowers shed soft radiance, lovely barenecked ladies with diamond tiaras looked down smiling on her from gilded oval frames.
How quiet and beautifully warm it was in these spacious rooms; on that thick soft carpet one might lie down and go to sleep.... If only that feeling of fear would not clutch at her throat, her brain, her temples, gripping them as in a vice.