She went into a department store and idly looked at some things without knowing what they were. It was a sale day, and the crowd in the store was immense. She came to herself when a sharp cry sounded at her right and the throng surged in that direction.
A woman had fainted, one of the saleswomen. She was a tall woman, thin and not bad looking. She had been waiting on Viola the moment before, and she had simply crumpled behind the counter without a word. The cry had come from a cash-girl who happened to see her fall. They lifted the woman and carried her limp and pitiful to the elevator, a policeman keeping back the crowd.
She left the store and wandered again aimlessly about the streets. The sidewalks were crowded, mostly with women. It was getting warm, and the women all looked tired and wilted. Lines of them disappeared into certain doors, and Viola, looking in, saw that these doors were entrances to cheap restaurants. It was the lunch hour, and these women were taking their short recess.
The display in the window of one of these places attracted her attention. It contained meats in various stages of preparation and dressing and a wild assortment of vegetables. Some flies had gotten inside the glass and hovered about the viands. She turned away in disgust.
She thought of her own lunch. When she was downtown St. John always took her to lunch with him at one of the hotels. The white napery, the soft lights, the stealthy-footed waiters, the music, the silver sprang into her mind in vivid contrast to the cheap display she had just turned from. She shuddered.
In the palm room of the Brinton with the cool, shadowed comfort about her and an ice before her, the thought of her tragedy returned. She had been evading it all day, putting it away from her, shunning it. But it was always with her, reminding her that her world, the life she had lived, was shattered.
What then? She must go away. It would be better to go quietly, without giving any reason, simply leave. Of course St. John would understand, as would Myrtle Weiss, but their guilt would seal their tongues.
Disappear? And then what? How would she live? What could she do? She was incompetent to teach. She knew nothing about office work. Of course, she could clerk in a store.
Suddenly a vision of what that life would mean to her passed deadeningly before her. She remembered the thin, tall woman who had fainted behind the counter without a word. The lines of wilted workers, hastening in their worn clothes to their cheap lunches, rose before her. She shivered.
For seven years she had lived in the lap of luxury. Nothing had been denied her. She had the best of clothes, the best of service, the choicest of food, the promptest of attention of every kind. Her home was one of the handsomest houses in the most restricted and stylish residence district of the city.