In her own apartment, bathed, freshened of the city’s penetrating grime, and now at her ease in a cool morning wrap, she sipped the tea that Hattie brought and then stretched out on the sofa, thankful to rest body and mind.
For a wonder, Jane Street was quiet that hot afternoon. The blessed stillness healed her ears of the blows of sound; she lay in the pleasant demi-light of lowered shades, disinclined to stir, to speak, to think.
But thinking can be stopped only by sleep. She remembered that she was to call Annan when she got home. Somehow she didn’t feel like it.
Lying there, her hands clasped under her chestnut curls, grey eyes widely remote, the idle thoughts went drifting through her mind, undirected, unchecked.
Visions of the past glimmered, went out, followed by others that floated by like phantoms—glimpses of Whitewater Farms, of her father in his spotless milking jacket, of a girl standing with ears stopped and eyes desperately shut while the great herd-bull died.
Tinted spectres of village people she had known rose, slipped away, faded, vanished;—Mazie’s three uncouth sons, Si, Willis, and Buddy—all already unreal to her, as though she merely had heard of them;—Dr. Wand, Dr. Benson, Ed. Lister, always redolent of fertilizer;—the minister, “Rev. Stiles”;—and then, unbidden, into her mind’s vague picture stepped a trim, graceful, polite young man with agreeable voice and long, clever fingers always stained with nicotine or acid—
The girl sat up abruptly; cleared her eyes of tangled curls with a sudden sweep of her slim hand as though to brush away the vision.
As she looked over her left shoulder at the mantle clock her telephone rang.
She sprang up, suddenly aware that she had but a few minutes to dress and go to meet Frank Donnell at the apartment of Albert Smull.
It was Annan on the wire.