As she approached Fifth Avenue she began to observe the way the women were dressed, and for the first time since she left Pedlar's Mill she felt old-fashioned and provincial. The younger women who passed her were all wearing enormous balloon sleeves and bell skirts, which were held up with the newest twist by tightly gloved hands. Now and then, she noticed, the sleeves were made of a different material from the dress, but the gloves were invariably of white kid, and the small coquettish hats were perched very high above crisply waved hair which was worn close at the temples. In spite of her blistered feet, she walked on rapidly, lifting her face to the wind, which blew strong and fresh over the lengthening shadows. How high and smooth and round the sky looked over the steep brown houses! Presently, from a hotel of grey stone, as gloomy as a prison, a gaily dressed girl flitted out into a hansom cab which was waiting in front of the door. There was a vision of prune-coloured velvet sleeves in a dress of grey satin, of a skirt that rustled in eddying folds over the pavement, and of a jingling gold chatelaine attached to the front of a pointed basque. "How happy she must be," Dorinda thought, "dressed like that, and with everything on earth that she wants!" She had turned to move on again, when a man carrying a basket of evergreens brushed against her, and she saw that he was engaged in replenishing the stone window boxes on the ground floor of the hotel. As she passed, a whiff of wet earth penetrated her thoughts, and immediately, in a miracle of recollection, she was back at Five Oaks in the old doctor's retreat. Every detail of that stormy afternoon started awake as if it had been released from a spell of enchantment. She saw the darkened room, lighted by the thin blue flame from the resinous pine; she saw the one unshuttered window, with the hunched box-bush and the white turkeys beyond; she heard the melancholy patter of the rain on the shingled roof; and she watched the old man's face, every line and blotch distorted by the quivering light, while he wagged his drunken head at her. A shudder jerked through her limbs. Her memory, which was beginning to heal, was suddenly raw again. Would she never be free? Was she doomed to bear that moment of all the moments in her life wherever she went? Her courage faded now as if the sun had gone under a cloud. She had been dragged back by the wind, by an odour, into the suffocating atmosphere of the past. Though her body was walking the city street, in her memory she was rushing out of that old house at Five Oaks. She was running into the mist; she was hurrying down the sandy road through the bulrushes; she was crouching by the old stump, with the wet leaves in her face and that suspense more terrible than any certainty in her mind. She listened again for the turn of the wheels, the clink of the mare's shoes; the slip and scramble in the mud holes; the hollow sound of hoofs striking on rock. . . .