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.
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