There were days when New York roared too loudly for Isabelle's nerves, when the jammed streets, the buzzing shops, the overflowing hotels and theatres, made her long for quiet. Then she thought of the Farm as the most stable memory of a fixed condition, and she had an unformed plan of "doing over" the old place, which was now her own, and making it the centre of the family's centrifugal energy. Meantime there was the great Potts, who promised her health, and the flashing charm of the city.
Occasionally she felt lonely in this packed procession, this hotel existence, with its multitude of strange faces, and longed for something familiar, even Torso! At such times when she saw the face of an old acquaintance, perhaps in a cab at a standstill in the press of the avenue, her heart warmed. Even a fleeting glimpse of something known was a relief. Clearly she must settle herself into this whirlpool, put out her tentacles, and grasp an anchorage. But where? What?
One morning as she and her mother were making slow progress down the avenue, she caught sight of Margaret Pole on the sidewalk, waiting to cross the stream, a little boy's hand in hers. Isabelle waved to her frantically, and then leaped from the cab, dodged between the pushing motors, and grasped Margaret.
"You here!" she gasped.
"We came back some months ago," Margaret explained.
She was thin, Isabelle thought, and her face seemed much older than the years warranted. Margaret, raising her voice above the roar, explained that they were living out of town, "in the country, in Westchester," and promised to come to lunch the next time she was in the city. Then with a nod and a smile she slipped into the stream again as if anxious to be lost, and Isabelle rejoined her mother.
"She looks as if she were saving her clothes," Mrs. Price announced with her precise view of what she observed. Isabelle, while she waited for the doctor, mused on the momentary vision of her old friend at the street corner. Margaret turned up in the noise and mist of the city, as everybody might turn up; but Margaret old, worn, and almost shabby! Then the nurse came for her and she went into the doctor's room, with a depressing sensation compounded of a bad night, the city roar, the vision of Margaret.
"Well, my lady, what's the story to-day?"
Dr. Potts looked up from his desk, and scrutinized the new patient out of his shaggy eyebrows. Isabelle began at once the neurasthenic's involved and particularized tale of woe, breaking at the end with almost a sob:—
"I am so useless! I am never going to be well,—what is the matter with me?"