She was a child of the streets; she loved them as an Arab loves the desert, or a sailor the sea. She had been brought up in the streets. There, in rough games, she had learned to hold her own; there, running the gauntlet of a mob of jeering boys, she had learned to endure valiantly, without longing for sympathy. Her mother had always tried her best to keep the child off the streets, but could not. On her way home from school, whenever she was sent on an errand, Angelica would seize the chance to linger in that violent and exciting life. And then, later, when she was a young girl, came those curious sidewalk flirtations, so hostile in mood, so brutally chaste. She wouldn’t stand any nonsense! After all, her life within the house with her mother was nothing, only interludes of rest in her vehement existence. It was out there, in the streets, that she had become Angelica. She had never yet traveled by railway, though she had often enough gone to the Grand Central Terminal with girl friends and pretended, rather pitifully, to be going on a journey. They would stand near the gateway of a train, and say good-by, and perhaps walk forward a few steps with the crowd. She was tremendously proud really to be going off now. In the tunnel she took the opportunity to study her reflection in the darkened window, and it pleased and encouraged her--the great, shadowy eyes, the pallor of her face, the big hat framing it. It seemed to her that she looked romantic, and not at all what she was. She began to imagine that she might hoodwink this Mrs. Russell, that she might pass muster even among ladies. II She never forgot her first sight of that house, and never afterward did it really look otherwise to her. In rain, in snow, in summer or winter, it was always to her as she had first seen it on that breezy spring morning. It was a big stone house on a wide, sunny hill, and it had somehow a festive air, with its striped awnings, the white curtains fluttering at open windows, and a flag flying on a pole on the summit of the hill. It put her in mind of a picture she had seen in an old school copy of "Ivanhoe," of a medieval castle on the day of a tournament. She was profoundly impressed. The complacency she had felt on the train melted away, and she began to realize how preposterous her idea was. She entered the iron gate and began walking up the long gravel path which led up the hill to the house, a solitary figure, with bare, sunny lawns on either side of her, behind her the highroad where motor-cars were spinning past, before her the august, the unknown house. Altogether an alien world where she felt mean and pitiful in her cheap clothes, her worn, shapeless boots. "I _look_ like a factory girl," she reflected bitterly. "Any one would know. Perhaps they won’t even let me in." The maid who opened the door was certainly not encouraging. She looked Angelica up and down.