At dawn her eyelids were weary at last, and she fell asleep. She prolonged the sleep consciously, half waking at intervals as the day grew brighter, pulling oblivion over her head again to shield herself from living, as a child hides beneath a quilt to keep away darkness.
Outside the world had awakened, going busily about its affairs while the day passed over it. The noise of the streets, voices, automobile-horns, rumbling wheels, came through the open windows with the hot sunshine, running like the sound of a river through her sleep. She awoke in the late afternoon, heavy-lidded, with creased cheeks, but once more quietly self-controlled.
Refreshed by a cold plunge, crisply dressed, composed, she ate dinner in the big, softly lighted dining-room, nodding across white tables to the business men she knew. Then, led by an impulse she did not question, she went out into the crowded streets. With her walked the ghost of the girl who had come down from Masonville, dazzled, wide-eyed, so pitifully sure of herself, to learn to telegraph.
Sacramento had changed. It had been a big town; it was now a city, radiating interurban lines, thrusting tall buildings toward the sky, smudging that sky with the smoke of factories and canneries. Its streets were sluggishly moving floods of automobiles; its wharves were crowded with boats; across the wide, yellow river spans of new bridges were reaching toward each other.
All the statistics of the city's growth, of the great reclamation projects, of the rich farms spreading over the old grain lands, were at Helen's finger-tips. A hundred times she had gone over them, drawn conclusions from them, pounded home-selling arguments with them, since she had added Sacramento valley lands to the San Joaquin properties she handled. But more eloquently her reviving memories showed her the gulf between the old days and the new.
Mrs. Brown's little restaurant and the room where Helen had lived, were gone. In their place stood a six-story office building of raw new brick. That imposing street down which she had stumbled awkwardly after Mrs. Campbell was now a row of dingy boarding-houses. Mrs. Campbell's house itself, once so awe-inspiring, had become a disconsolate building with peeling paint, standing in a ragged lawn, and across the porch where she and Paul had said good-by in the dawn there was now a black and gold sign, "Ah Wong, Chinese Herb Doctor." She went quickly past it.
For the first time in the hurried years her thoughts turned inward, self-questioning, and she tried to follow step by step the changes that had taken place in her. But she could not see them clearly for the memory of the girl that she had been, a girl she saw now as a piteous young thing quite outside herself, a lovely, emotional, valiant young struggler against unknown odds. She felt an aching compassion, a longing to shield that girl from the life she had faced with such blind courage, to save her youth and sweetness. But the girl, of course, was gone, like the room from which she had looked so eagerly at the automobile.
It was eleven o'clock when she walked briskly through the groups in the hotel lobby, took her key from the room clerk and left a call for the early San Francisco train. She would reach the city in time to get the final contracts for the sale she had made yesterday, to take them to San José and get them signed the same day. The thought of Bert lay like a menace in the back of her mind, but she kept it there. She could not foresee what would happen; she would meet it when it occurred. Meantime she would go about her work as usual. Her attitude toward the future, her attitude toward even herself, was one of waiting. She fell quietly asleep.
On the train next morning she bought the San Francisco papers. The headlines screamed the news at her. It was war. She missed one train to San José in order to talk to Mr. Clark. The news had made no change in the atmosphere of Clark & Hayward's wide, clean-looking office, where salesmen lounged against the counters, their elbows resting on plate glass that covered surveyor's maps and photographs of alfalfa fields. The talk, as she stopped to speak to one and another, was the usual news of sales made and lost, quarrels over commissions, personal gossip. She waited her turn to enter Mr. Clark's office, and when it came she looked at him with a keenness hidden under the friendliness of her eyes.
She liked to talk to Mr. Clark. Three years of working with him had brought her an understanding of this nervous, quick-witted, harassed man. There was comradeship between them, a sympathy tempered by wariness on both sides. Neither would have lost the slightest business advantage for the other, but beyond that necessary antagonism they were friends. She watched with pleasure the quick play of his mind, managing hers as he would have handled the thoughts of a buyer; she was conscious that he saw the motives behind her method of counter-attack; a business interview between them was like a friendly bout between fencers. But he spoke to her sometimes of the wife and children whose pictures were on his desk; she knew how deeply he was devoted to them. And once, during an idle evening in a Stockton hotel, he had held her breathless with the whole story of his business career, talking to her as he might have talked to himself.