But the air was very close. I felt depressed, disappointed, that the time and the place yielded me nothing. I was faint, too; I had taken nothing but the cocoa since noon. Without realizing it, another reaction from that strange elation of spirit was setting in. I knew I ought to be in the attic room in Chelsea rather than where I was. It was already nine, and an hour's ride before me on the surface car. I went out to Amsterdam Avenue. No car was in sight. I walked on down the hill, knowing that one would soon overtake me. A man and woman were just behind me talking--at least, the woman was. I recognized her voice as one of those I had heard on the winding path by the poplars. A moment after, they passed me in a noticeably peculiar fashion: the man sauntering by on my right, the woman hurrying past on my left. At the same moment I heard the car coming down the hill. I turned at once, but only to see the man, who had passed me, running swiftly along the pavement and up the hill to meet it; the woman was running after him. I saw that the car was over full. The platform and steps were black with human beings clinging to the guard rails like swarming bees alight. I saw the man struggle madly to catch the guards and gain a footing on the lower step, the woman still running beside him and holding him by the coat. Then I was aware of a sudden sweeping movement of the man's free arm, the roar of the car as it sped down the incline, and of the woman lying, hatless from the force of the man's blow, on the pavement beside the track. He had freed himself so! Before I could reach her the woman was up and off again, running hatless after the quickly receding car. Only one cry, no scream, escaped her. I shivered. There was nothing to be done with such as these, no rescue possible. A sudden thought half paralyzed me; I stood motionless: Had my own mother ever been cast off like this? Had such treatment been the cause of her seeking the river? Had I, Marcia Farrell, been fathered by such a brute? For the second time in my life, I felt my hardness of heart towards the mother I had never known soften with pity; a sob rose in my throat. I shook my shoulders as if freeing them from some nightmare clutch, and hurried to the next corner to meet the car that was following the other closely. IV I unlocked my attic room in the fourth storey of the old Chelsea house and lighted the lamp. In contrast to what both ear and eye had been witness during the evening: Delia Beaseley's account of my mother's rescue and death, and that scene of life's brutality on Columbia Heights, the sight of the small plain interior gave me, for the first time in all the seven years, a home-sense, a feeling of welcome and refuge.