1One hot, breathless night in June Sabine overcame her sense of bored indolence enough to give a dinner at Brook Cottage—a dinner well served, with delicious food, which it might have been said she flung at her guests with a superb air of indifference from the seat at the head of the table, where she sat painted, ugly and magnificently dressed, watching them all in a perverse sort of pleasure. It was a failure as an entertainment, for it had been years since Sabine had given a dinner where the guests were not clever enough to entertain themselves, and now that she was back again in a world where people were invited for every sort of reason save that you really wanted their company, she declined to make any effort. It was a failure, too, because Thérèse, for whom it was given, behaved exactly as she had behaved on the night of the ball. There was an uneasiness and a strain, a sense of awkwardness among the callow young men and a sense of weariness in Sabine and Olivia. O’Hara was there, for Sabine had kept her half-promise; but even he sat quietly, all his boldness and dash vanished before a boyish shyness. The whole affair seemed to be drowned in the lassitude, the enchantment that enveloped the old house on the other bank of the river.

2Olivia had come, almost against her will, reduced to a state of exhaustion after a long call from Aunt Cassie on the subject of the rumored affair between Sybil and their Irish neighbor. And when they rose, she slipped quietly away into the garden, because she could not bear the thought of making strained and artificial conversation. She wanted, horribly, to be left in peace.

3It was a superb night—hot, as a summer night should be—but clear, too, so that the whole sky was like a sapphire dome studded with diamonds. At the front of the cottage, beyond the borders of the little terraced garden, the marshes spread their dark carpet toward the distant dunes, which with the descent of darkness had turned dim and blue against the purer white of the line made by the foaming surf. The feel of the damp thick grass against the sole of her silver slippers led her to stop for a moment, breathing deeply, and filled her with a mild, half-mystical desire to blend herself into all the beauty that surrounded her, into the hot richness of the air, the scents of the opening blossoms and of pushing green stems, into the grass and the sea and the rich-smelling marshes, to slip away into a state which was nothing and yet everything, to float into eternity. She had abruptly an odd, confused sense of the timelessness of all these forces and sensations, of the sea and the marshes, the pushing green stems and the sapphire dome powdered with diamonds above her head. She saw for the first time in all her existence the power of something which went on and on, ignoring pitiful small creatures like herself and all those others in the cottage behind her, a power which ignored cities and armies and nations, which would go on and on long after the grass had blanketed the ruins of the old house at Pentland. It was sweeping past her, leaving her stranded somewhere in the dull backwaters. She wanted suddenly, fiercely, to take part in all the great spectacle of eternal fertility, a mystery which was stronger than any of them or all of them together, a force which in the end would crush all their transient little prides and beliefs and traditions.

4And then she thought, as if she were conscious of it for the first time, “I am tired, tired to death, and a little mad.”

5Moving across the damp grass she seated herself on a stone bench which O’Hara had placed beneath one of the ancient apple-trees left standing from the orchard which had covered all the land about Brook Cottage in the days when Savina Pentland was still alive; and for a long time (she never knew how long) she remained there lost in one of those strange lapses of consciousness when one is neither awake nor asleep but in the vague borderland where there is no thought, no care, no troubles. And then slowly she became aware of some one standing there quite near her, beneath the ancient, gnarled tree. As if the presence were materialized somehow out of a dream, she noticed first the faint, insinuating masculine odor of cigar-smoke blending itself with the scent of the growing flowers in Sabine’s garden, and then turning she saw a black figure which she recognized at once as that of O’Hara. There was no surprise in the sight of him; it seemed in a queer way as if she had been expecting him.

6As she turned, he moved toward her and spoke. “Our garden has flourished, hasn’t it?” he asked. “You’d never think it was only a year old.”

7“Yes,” she said. “It has flourished marvelously.” And then, after a little pause, “How long have you been standing there?”

8“Only a moment. I saw you come out of the house.” They listened for a time to the distant melancholy pounding of the surf, and presently he said softly, with a kind of awe in his voice: “It is a marvelous night ... a night full of splendor.”

9She made an effort to answer him, but somehow she could think of nothing to say. The remark, uttered so quietly, astonished her, because she had never thought of O’Hara as one who would be sensitive to the beauty of a night. It was too dark to distinguish his face, but she kept seeing him as she remembered him, seeing him, too, as the others thought of him—rough and vigorous but a little common, with the scar on his temple and the intelligent blue eyes, and the springy walk, so unexpectedly easy and full of grace for a man of his size. No, one might as well have expected little Higgins the groom to say: “It is a night full of splendor.” The men she knew—Anson’s friends—never said such things. She doubted whether they would ever notice such a night, and if they did notice it, they would be a little ashamed of having done anything so unusual.

10“The party is not a great success,” he was saying.

11“No.”

12“No one seems to be getting on with any one else. Mrs. Callendar ought not to have asked me. I thought she was shrewder than that.”

13Olivia laughed softly. “She may have done it on purpose. You can never tell why she does anything.”

14For a time he remained silent, as if pondering the speech, and then he said, “You aren’t cold out here?”

15“No, not on a night like this.”

16There was a silence so long and so vaguely perilous that she felt the need of making some speech, politely and with banality, as if they were two strangers seated in a drawing-room after dinner instead of in the garden which together they had made beneath the ancient apple-trees.

17“I keep wondering,” she said, “how long it will be until the bungalows of Durham creep down and cover all this land.”

18“They won’t, not so long as I own land between Durham and the sea.”

19In the darkness she smiled at the thought of an Irish Roman Catholic politician as the protector of this old New England countryside, and aloud she said, “You’re growing to be like all the others. You want to make the world stand still.”

20“Yes, I can see that it must seem funny to you.” There was no bitterness in his voice, but only a sort of hurt, which again astonished her, because it was impossible to think of O’Hara as one who could be hurt.

21“There will always be the Pentland house, but, of course, all of us will die some day and then what?”

22“There will always be our children.”

23She was aware slowly of slipping back into that world of cares and troubles behind her from which she had escaped a little while before. She said, “You are looking a long way into the future.”

24“Perhaps, but I mean to have children one day. And at Pentlands there is always Sybil, who will fight for it fiercely. She’ll never give it up.”

25“But it’s Jack who will own it, and I’m not so sure about him.”

26Unconsciously she sighed, knowing now that she was pretending again, being dishonest. She was pretending again that Jack would live to have Pentlands for his own, that he would one day have children who would carry it on. She kept saying to herself, “It is only the truth that can save us all.” And she knew that O’Hara understood her feeble game of pretending. She knew because he stood there silently, as if Jack were already dead, as if he understood the reason for the faint bitter sigh and respected it.

27“You see a great deal of Sybil, don’t you?” she asked.

28“Yes, she is a good girl. One can depend on her.”

29“Perhaps if she had a little of Thérèse or Mrs. Callendar in her, she’d be safer from being hurt.”

30He did not answer her at once, but she knew that in the darkness he was standing there, watching her.

31“But that was a silly thing to say,” she murmured. “I don’t suppose you know what I mean.”

32He answered her quickly. “I do know exactly. I know and I’m sure Mrs. Callendar knows. We’ve both learned to save ourselves—not in the same school, but the same lesson, nevertheless. But as to Sybil, I think that depends upon whom she marries.”

33(“So now,” thought Olivia, “it is coming. It is Sybil whom he loves. He wants to marry her. That is why he has followed me out here.”) She was back again now, solidly enmeshed in all the intricacies of living. She had a sudden, shameful, twinge of jealousy for Sybil, who was so young, who had pushed her so completely into the past along with all the others at Pentlands.

34“I was wondering,” she said, “whether she was not seeing too much of you, whether she might not be a bother.”

35“No, she’ll never be that.” And then in a voice which carried a faint echo of humor, he added, “I know that in a moment you are going to ask my intentions.”

36“No,” she said, “no”; but she could think of nothing else to say. She felt suddenly shy and awkward and a little idiotic, like a young girl at her first dance.

37“I shall tell you what my intentions are,” he was saying, and then he broke off suddenly. “Why is it so impossible to be honest in this world, when we live such a little while? It would be such a different place if we were all honest wouldn’t it?”

38He hesitated, waiting for her to answer, and she said, “Yes,” almost mechanically, “very different.”

39When he replied there was a faint note of excitement in his voice. It was pitched a little lower and he spoke more quickly. In the darkness she could not see him, and yet she was sharply conscious of the change.

40“I’ll tell you, then,” he was saying. “I’ve been seeing a great deal of Sybil in the hope that I should see a little of her mother.”

41She did not answer him. She simply sat there, speechless, overcome by confusion, as if she had been a young girl with her first lover. She was even made a little dizzy by the sound of his voice.

42“I have offended you. I’m sorry. I only spoke the truth. There is no harm in that.”

43With a heroic effort to speak intelligently, she succeeded in saying, “No, I am not offended.” (It all seemed such a silly, helpless, pleasant feeling.) “No, I’m not offended. I don’t know....”

44Of only one thing was she certain; that this strange, dizzy, intoxicated state was like nothing she had ever experienced. It was sinister and overwhelming in a bitter-sweet fashion. She kept thinking, “I can begin to understand how a young girl can be seduced, how she cannot know what she is doing.”

45“I suppose,” he was saying, “that you think me presumptuous.”

46“No, I only think everything is impossible, insane.”

47“You think me a kind of ruffian, a bum, an Irishman, a Roman Catholic, some one you have never heard of.” He waited, and then added: “I am all that, from one point of view.”

48“No, I don’t think that; I don’t think that.”

49He sat down beside her quietly on the stone bench. “You have every right to think it,” he continued softly. “Every right in the world, and still things like that make no difference, nothing makes any difference.”

50“My father,” she said softly, “was a man very like you. His enemies sometimes used to call him ‘shanty Irish.’...”

51She knew all the while that she should have risen and sought indignant refuge in the house. She knew that perhaps she was being absurd, and yet she stayed there quietly. She was so tired and she had waited for so long (she only knew it now in a sudden flash) to have some one talk to her in just this way, as if she were a woman. She needed some one to lean upon, so desperately.

52“How can you know me?” she asked out of a vague sense of helplessness. “How can you know anything about me?”

53He did not touch her. He only sat there in the darkness, making her feel by a sort of power which was too strong for her, that all he said was terribly the truth.

54“I know, I know, all about you, everything. I’ve watched you. I’ve understood you, even better than the others. A man whose life has been like mine sees and understands a great deal that others never notice because for him everything depends upon a kind of second sight. It’s the one great weapon of the opportunist.” There was a silence and he asked, “Can you understand that? It may be hard, because your life has been so different.”

55“Not so different, as you might think, only perhaps I’ve made more of a mess of it.” And straightening her body, she murmured, “It is foolish of me to let you talk this way.”

56He interrupted her with a quick burst of almost boyish eagerness. “But you’re glad, aren’t you? You’re glad, all the same, whether you care anything for me or not. You’ve deserved it for a long time.”

57She began to cry softly, helplessly, without a sound, the tears running down her cheeks, and she thought, “Now I’m being a supreme fool. I’m pitying myself.” But she could not stop.

58It appeared that even in the darkness he was aware of her tears, for he chose not to interrupt them. They sat thus for a long time in silence, Olivia conscious with a terrible aching acuteness, of the beauty of the night and finding it all strange and unreal and confused.

59“I wanted you to know,” he said quietly, “that there was some one near you, some one who worships you, who would give up everything for you.” And after a time, “Perhaps we had better go in now. You can go in through the piazza and powder your nose. I’ll go in through the door from the garden.”

60And as they walked across the damp, scented grass, he said, “It would be pleasant if you would join Sybil and me riding in the morning.”

61“But I haven’t been on a horse in years,” said Olivia.

62Throughout the rest of the evening, while she sat playing bridge with Sabine and O’Hara and the Mannering boy, her mind kept straying from the game into unaccustomed byways. It was not, she told herself, that she was even remotely in love with O’Hara; it was only that some one—a man who was no creature of ordinary attractions—had confessed his admiration for her, and so she felt young and giddy and elated. The whole affair was silly ... and yet, yet, in a strange way, it was not silly at all. She kept thinking of Anson’s remarks about his father and old Mrs. Soames, “It’s a silly affair”—and of Sybil saying gravely, “Only not middle-aged, like O’Hara,” and it occurred to her at the same time that in all her life she felt really young for the first time. She had been young as she sat on the stone bench under the ancient apple-tree, young in spite of everything.

63And aloud she would say, “Four spades,” and know at once that she should have made no such bid.

64She was unnerved, too, by the knowledge that there were, all the while, two pairs of eyes far more absorbed in her than in the game of bridge—the green ones of Sabine and the bright blue ones of O’Hara. She could not look up without encountering the gaze of one or the other; and to protect herself she faced them with a hard, banal little smile which she put in place in the mechanical way used by Miss Egan. It was the sort of smile which made her face feel very tired, and for the first time she had a half-comic flash of pity for Miss Egan. The face of the nurse must at times have grown horribly tired.

65The giddiness still clung to her as she climbed into the motor beside Sybil and they drove off down the lane which led from Brook Cottage to Pentlands. The road was a part of a whole tracery of lanes, bordered by hedges and old trees, which bound together the houses of the countryside, and at night they served as a promenade and meeting-place for the servants of the same big houses. One came upon them in little groups of three or four, standing by gates or stone walls, gossiping and giggling together in the darkness, exchanging tales of the life that passed in the houses of their masters, stories of what the old man did yesterday, and how Mrs. So-and-so only took one bath a week. There was a whole world which lay beneath the solid, smooth, monotonous surface that shielded the life of the wealthy, a world which in its way was full of mockery and dark secrets and petty gossip, a world perhaps fuller of truth because it lay hidden away where none—save perhaps Aunt Cassie, who knew how many fascinating secrets servants had—ever looked, and where there was small need for the sort of pretense which Olivia found so tragic. It circulated the dark lanes at night after the dinners of the neighborhood were finished, and sometimes the noisy echoes of its irreverent mockery rose in wild Irish laughter that echoed back and forth across the mist-hung meadows.

66The same lanes were frequented, too, by lovers, who went in pairs instead of groups of three or four, and at times there were echoes of a different sort of merriment—the wild, half-hysterical laughter of some kitchen-maid being wooed roughly and passionately in some dark corner by a groom or a house-servant. It was a world which blossomed forth only at nightfall. Sometimes in the darkness the masters, motoring home from a ball or a dinner, would come upon an amorous couple, bathed in the sudden brilliant glare of motor-lights, sitting with their arms about each other against a tree, or lying half-hidden among a tangle of hawthorn and elder-bushes.

67To-night, as Olivia and Sybil drove in silence along the road the hot air was filled with the thick scent of the hawthorn-blossoms and the rich, dark odor of cattle, blown toward them across the meadows by the faint salt breeze from the marshes. It was late and the lights of the motor encountered no strayed lovers until at the foot of the hill by the old bridge the glare illuminated suddenly the figures of a man and a woman seated together against the stone wall. At their approach the woman slipped quickly over the wall, and the man, following, leaped lightly as a goat to the top and into the field beyond. Sybil laughed and murmured, “It’s Higgins again.”

68It was Higgins. There was no mistaking the stocky, agile figure clad in riding-breeches and sleeveless cotton shirt, and as he leaped the wall the sight of him aroused in Olivia a nebulous fleeting impression that was like a half-forgotten memory. A startled fawn, she thought, must have scuttled off into the bushes in the same fashion. And she had suddenly that same strange, prickly feeling of terror that had affected Sabine on the night she discovered him hidden in the lilacs watching the ball.

69She shivered, and Sybil asked, “You’re not cold?”

70“No.”

71She was thinking of Higgins and hoping that this was not the beginning of some new scrape. Once before a girl had come to her in trouble—a Polish girl, whom she helped and sent away because she could not see that forcing Higgins to marry her would have brought anything but misery for both of them. It never ceased to amaze her that a man so gnarled and ugly, such a savage, hairy little man as Higgins, should have half the girls of the countryside running after him.

72In her own room she listened in the darkness until she heard the sound of Jack’s gentle breathing and then, after undressing, she sat for a long time at the window looking out across the meadows toward the marshes. There was a subdued excitement which seemed to run through all her body and would not let her sleep. She no longer felt the weariness of spirit which had let her slip during these last few months into a kind of lethargy. She was alive, more alive than she had ever been, even as a young girl; her cheeks were hot and flushed, so that she placed her white hands against them to feel a coolness that was missing from the night air; but they, too, were hot with life.

73And as she sat there, the sounds from Sybil’s room across the hall died away and at last the night grew still save for the sound of her son’s slow breathing and the familiar ghostly creakings of the old house. She was alone now, the only one who was not sleeping; and sitting above the mist-hung meadows she grew more quiet. The warm rich scents of the night drifted in at the window, and again she became aware of a kind of voluptuousness which she had sensed in the air as she sat, hours earlier, on Sabine’s terrace above the sea. It had assailed her again as they drove through the lane across the low, marshy pastures by the river. And then in the figure of Higgins, leaping the wall like a goat, it had come with a shock to a sudden climax of feeling, with a sudden acuteness which even terrified her. It still persisted a little, the odd feeling of some tremendous, powerful force at work all about her, moving swiftly and quietly, thrusting aside and annihilating those who opposed it.

74She thought again, “I am a little mad to-night. What has come over me?” And she grew frightened, though it was a different sort of terror from that which afflicted her at the odd moments when she felt all about her the presence of the dead who lived on and on at Pentlands. What she knew now was no terror of the dead; it was rather a terror of warm, passionate life. She thought, “This is what must have happened to the others. This is how they must have felt before they died.”

75It was not physical death that she meant, but a death somehow of the soul, a death which left behind it such withered people as Aunt Cassie and Anson, the old woman in the north wing, and even a man so rugged and powerful as John Pentland, who had struggled so much more fiercely than the others. And she got a sudden sense of being caught between two dark struggling forces in fierce combat. It was confused and vague, yet it made her feel suddenly ill in a physical sense. The warm feeling of life and excitement flowed away leaving her chilled and relaxed, weary all at once, and filled with a soft lassitude, still looking out into the night, still smelling the thick odor of cattle and hawthorn-blossoms.

76She never knew whether or not she had fallen asleep in the bergère by the window, but she did know that she was roused abruptly by the sound of footsteps. Outside the door of her room, in the long hallway, there was some one walking, gently, cautiously. It was not this time merely the creaking of the old house; it was the sound of footfalls, regular, measured, inevitable, those of some person of almost no weight at all. She listened, and slowly, cautiously, almost as if the person were blind and groping his way in the darkness, the step advanced until presently it came opposite her and thin slivers of light outlined the door that led into the hall. Quietly she rose and, still lost in a vague sense of moving in a nightmare, she went over to the door and opened it. Far down the long hall, at the door which opened into the stairway leading to the attic of the house, there was a small circle of light cast by an electric torch. It threw into a black silhouette the figure of an old woman with white hair whom Olivia recognized at once. It was the old woman escaped from the north wing. While she stood watching her, the figure, fumbling at the door, opened it and disappeared quickly into the stairway.

77There was no time to be lost, not time even to go in search of the starched Miss Egan. The poor creature might fling herself from the upper windows. So, without stopping even to throw a dressing-gown about her, Olivia went quickly along the dark hall and up the stairway where the fantastic creature in the flowered wrapper had vanished.

78The attic was an enormous, unfinished room that covered the whole of the house, a vast cavern of a place, empty save for a few old trunks and pieces of broken furniture. The flotsam and jetsam of Pentland life had been stowed away there, lost and forgotten in the depths of the big room, for more than a century. No one entered it. Since Sybil and Jack had grown, it remained half-forgotten. They had played there on rainy days as small children, and before them Sabine and Anson had played in the same dark, mysterious corners among broken old trunks and sofas and chairs.

79Olivia found the place in darkness save for the patches of blue light where the luminous night came in at the double row of dormer windows, and at the far end, by a group of old trunks, the circle of light from the torch that moved this way and that, as if old Mrs. Pentland were searching for something. In the haste of her escape and flight, her thin white hair had come undone and fell about her shoulders. A sickly smell of medicine hung about her.

80Olivia touched her gently and said, “What have you lost, Mrs. Pentland? Can I help you?”

81The old woman turned and, throwing the light of the torch full into Olivia’s face, stared at her with the round blue eyes, murmuring, “Oh, it’s you, Olivia. Then it’s all right. Perhaps you can help me.”

82“What was it you lost? We might look for it in the morning.”

83“I’ve forgotten what it was now. You startled me, and you know my poor brain isn’t very good, at best. It never has been since I married.” Sharply she looked at Olivia. “It didn’t affect you that way, did it? You don’t ever drift away and feel yourself growing dimmer and dimmer, do you? It’s odd. Perhaps it’s different with your husband.”

84Olivia saw that the old woman was having one of those isolated moments of clarity and reason which were more horrible than her insanity because for a time she made you see that, after all, she was like yourself, human and capable of thought. To Olivia these moments were almost as if she witnessed the rising of the dead.

85“No,” said Olivia. “Perhaps if we went to bed now, you’d remember in the morning.”

86Old Mrs. Pentland shook her head violently. “No, no, I must find them now. It may be all different in the morning and I won’t know anything and that Irish woman won’t let me out. Say over the names of a few things like prunes, prisms, persimmons. That’s what Mr. Dickens used to have his children do when he couldn’t think of a word.”

87“Let me have the light,” said Olivia; “perhaps I can find what it is you want.”

88With the meekness of a child, the old woman gave her the electric torch and Olivia, turning it this way and that, among the trunks and old rubbish, made a mock search among the doll-houses and the toy dishes left scattered in the corner of the attic where the children had played house for the last time.

89While she searched, the old woman kept up a running comment, half to herself: “It’s something I wanted to find very much. It’ll make a great difference here in the lives of all of us. I thought I might find Sabine here to help me. She was here yesterday morning, playing with Anson. It rained all day and they couldn’t go out. I hid it here yesterday when I came up to see them.”

90Olivia again attempted wheedling.

91“It’s late now, Mrs. Pentland. We ought both to be in bed. You try to remember what it is you want, and in the morning I’ll come up and find it for you.”

92For a moment the old woman considered this, and at last she said, “You wouldn’t give it to me if you found it. I’m sure you wouldn’t. You’re too afraid of them all.”

93“I promise you I will. You can trust me, can’t you?”

94“Yes, yes, you’re the only one who doesn’t treat me as if I wasn’t quite bright. Yes, I think I can trust you.” Another thought occurred to her abruptly. “But I wouldn’t remember again. I might forget. Besides, I don’t think Miss Egan would let me.”

95Olivia took one of the thin old hands in hers and said, as if she were talking to a little child, “I know what we’ll do. To-morrow you write it out on a bit of paper and then I’ll find it and bring it to you.”

96“I’m sure little Sabine could find it,” said the old woman. “She’s very good at such things. She’s such a clever child.”

97“I’ll go over and fetch Sabine to have her help me.”

98The old woman looked at her sharply. “You’ll promise that?” she asked. “You’ll promise?”

99“Of course, surely.”

100“Because all the others are always deceiving me.”

101And then quite gently she allowed herself to be led across the moonlit patches of the dusty floor, down the stairs and back to her room. In the hall of the north wing they came suddenly upon the starched Miss Egan, all her starch rather melted and subdued now, her red face purple with alarm.

102“I’ve been looking for her everywhere, Mrs. Pentland,” she told Olivia. “I don’t know how she escaped. She was asleep when I left. I went down to the kitchen for her orange-juice, and while I was gone she disappeared.”

103It was the old woman who answered. Looking gravely at Olivia, she said, with an air of confidence, “You know I never speak to her at all. She’s common. She’s a common Irish servant. They can shut me up with her, but they can’t make me speak to her.” And then she began to drift back again into the hopeless state that was so much more familiar. She began to mumble over and over again a chain of words and names which had no coherence.

104Olivia and Miss Egan ignored her, as if part of her—the vaguely rational old woman—had disappeared, leaving in her place this pitiful chattering creature who was a stranger.

105Olivia explained where it was she found the old woman and why she had gone there.

106“She’s been talking on the subject for days,” said Miss Egan. “I think it’s letters that she’s looking for, but it may be nothing at all. She mixes everything terribly.”

107Olivia was shivering now in her nightdress, more from weariness and nerves than from the chill of the night.

108“I wouldn’t speak of it to any of the others, Miss Egan,” she said. “It will only trouble them. And we must be more careful about her in the future.”

109The old woman had gone past them now, back into the dark room where she spent her whole life, and the nurse had begun to recover a little of her defiant confidence. She even smiled, the hard, glittering smile which always said, “You cannot do without me, whatever happens.”

110Aloud she said, “I can’t imagine what happened, Mrs. Pentland.”

111“It was an accident, never mind,” said Olivia. “Good-night. Only I think it’s better not to speak of what has happened. It will only alarm the others.”

112But she was puzzled, Olivia, because underneath the dressing-gown Miss Egan had thrown about her shoulders she saw that the nurse was dressed neither in night-clothes nor in her uniform, but in the suit of blue serge that she wore on the rare occasions when she went into the city.