"Very well. I'll go to a hotel for tonight."
"Yes'm. W'ich hotel, Commodo', Biltmo', Belmont?"
Lucinda settled on the Commodore, because it was the largest of the three and she would be lost in the multitude of its patrons.
She registered as Mrs. L. Druce, Chicago, and, before proceeding to her room, arranged to have the head porter purchase her ticket and reservation the first thing in the morning.
Some hours later she was awakened by a cramp in one of her arms and found that she had fallen asleep while sitting on the edge of her bed. In a daze she finished undressing, and sleep again overwhelmed her like a dense, warm, obliterating cloud.
It seemed but a minute or two before she was being scolded awake by the shrewish tongue of the telephone by the head of the bed, to hear a dispassionate voice recite the information that it was seven o'clock, the hour at which she had asked to be called.
She felt as if she had not slept at all.
Again, in the train, the aching misery of heart and mind could not prevent her nodding and drowsing all morning long; and after a meal of railroad food by way of luncheon, she gave up trying to stave off the needs of a highly organized nature fatigued by inordinate strains, called the porter, had him make up the lower berth in her drawing-room, and went to bed.
In the neighborhood of midnight she woke up to discover, first by peering out under the edge of the window-shade at concrete platforms bleakly blue and bare in the glare of unseen lamps, then by consulting a timetable, that the train was in Cleveland.
As it pulled out again, she resigned herself to the inescapable. Rested, her mind clear and active, and with nothing to do but think for eight hours more, she must go down into the hell appointed.