Each in a different way helpless before this thing. Gloria was still pretty, as pretty as she would ever be again--her cheeks were flushed and she was wearing a new dress that she had bought--imprudently--for fifty dollars. She had hoped she could persuade Anthony to take her out to-night, to a restaurant or even to one of the great, gorgeous moving picture palaces where there would be a few people to look at her, at whom she could bear to look in turn. She wanted this because she knew her cheeks were flushed and because her dress was new and becomingly fragile. Only very occasionally, now, did they receive any invitations. But she did not tell these things to Muriel."Gloria, dear, I wish we could have dinner together, but I promised a man and it's seven-thirty already. I've got to _tear_.""Oh, I couldn't, anyway. In the first place I've been ill all day. I couldn't eat a thing."After she had walked with Muriel to the door, Gloria came back into the room, turned out the lamp, and leaning her elbows on the window sill looked out at palisades park, where the brilliant revolving circle of the Ferris wheel was like a trembling mirror catching the yellow reflection of the moon. The street was quiet now; the children had gone in--over the way she could see a family at dinner. pointlessly, ridiculously, they rose and walked about the table; seen thus, all that they did appeared incongruous--it was as though they were being jiggled carelessly and to no purpose by invisible overhead wires.She looked at her watch--it was eight o'clock. She had been pleased for a part of the day--the early afternoon--in walking along that Broadway of Harlem, One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, with her nostrils alert to many odors, and her mind excited by the extraordinary beauty of some Italian children. It affected her curiously--as Fifth Avenue had affected her once, in the days when, with the placid confidence of beauty, she had known that it was all hers, every shop and all it held, every adult toy glittering in a window, all hers for the asking. Here on One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street there were Salvation Army bands and spectrum-shawled old ladies on door-steps and sugary, sticky candy in the grimy hands of shiny-haired children--and the late sun striking down on the sides of the tall tenements. All very rich and racy and savory, like a dish by a provident French chef that one could not help enjoying, even though one knew that the ingredients were probably left-overs....