"I'm not ill—" her proud chin lifted. She was pulling herself together again, she even managed to stand by holding one hand on the edge of the table.
The whirling blackness of the moment had passed. Even while the clerk was hastily calling back the judge's chauffeur, the drooping little figure had straightened itself.
"I think the lady was kinda faint," mumbled the clerk, mechanically replacing the dangling receiver. "She's O.K. now—ain't you?"
"Did you find where you wanted to go?" the man's respectful query helped her.
"If it's not too far," she answered with dignity, "I think I'd like to go to my own house—it's in a street called Montrose Place."
Inside the car her head drooped, she felt the new Babiche licking her lifeless hand, she felt the whir of the motor. It vibrated through every jangling nerve of her weary body. The whole impossible journey was like a nightmare.
"That wasn't I, I saw in there—" her thoughts blurred, "it's just a dreadful dream—that wasn't Felice I saw—oh, Dudley Hamilt—I was so pretty that night! And now I'm just old—like Grandy—like Piqueur—" After a million years—or was it after one little minute?—the car stopped easily. Like the dream that Felicia had hoped the whole dreadful day had been. She opened her eyes as though she might have been waking up in the bed that Poquelin, the father of Moliere, had carved.
"This," said the judge's chauffeur dubiously, "is Montrose Place."
She got out slowly, tucking Babiche mechanically under her arm. The man lifted out her bag and touched his cap,—she did not even see him go.
The huge willows still arched above Montrose Place, but they were shabby and dying. And the mossy bricked sidewalk was gone but on its muddy concrete successor, scores and scores of noisy, dirty, alien children squabbled and cried. Some of them were pushing against this strange woman who had descended from the motor, some of them fingered her coat, one bolder than the rest sat down upon her bag. It seemed to her as though more children than she had known there were in the whole world were crowding against her. Wherever she looked there were children. They hung from the once lovely old windows, they slid down the once beautiful balustrade, they tumbled out of every doorway. And wherever there were not children there were signs. Blatant, dingy signs. The first one she glimpsed was propped before the basement gate through which the housemaids had been wont to enter. It was shaped like a tombstone and with amateur lettering announced: