"Let's stand here until the next car comes." "Do you feel any worse?" "No, not worse, only different." "I've known 'em to faint dead away the first time they left the hospital." "Well, I've no idea of fainting. Just tell me when you see the right car coming." The thing that worried her most, and she had puzzled over this from the minute she came down the steps of the hospital, was the curious impression in her mind that she had seen everything and everybody before. Every face was familiar to her. She seemed to have known each person who passed her in some former time and place, which she dimly remembered; and each reminded her, in some vague resemblance of contour, feature, or shifting expression, of the way Jason had looked when she first loved him. "Just as I was trying to forget him," she thought, with irritation, "everybody begins to look like him." When the car came, and she got on and found a seat beside a fat German, who was buried in his newspaper, this senseless irritation still persisted. "Maybe if I stop looking at their faces and keep my eyes fixed on their clothes, the resemblance will pass away," she told herself resolutely. "What a funny hat, just like a cabbage, that woman is wearing, and the man with her has on a tie like a little boy's. He must be an artist. I read in some book that artists wore velvet coats and flowing ties." Then, inadvertently, she raised her eyes to the face of the stranger, and discovered that he was gazing at her with a look that reminded her of Jason. Even the fat German wore a familiar expression when he turned to touch the bell and glanced down at her as he rose to go out of the car. At the lodging-house, where she had to explain her case all over again, she was still haunted by this delusive resemblance. There might have been a general disintegration and reassembling of personalities since she had gone to the hospital, and she felt that she had seen them all before in other circumstances and other periods. Alone, at last, in her little room, she dropped wearily on the hard bed, which, like the wife of the proprietor, bulged in the wrong places, and lay, without seeing or hearing, surrendered to the grey hollowness of existence. Sheer physical weakness kept her motionless for an hour; and when at the end of that time, she lifted her hands to take off her hat, she felt as if she were recovering from the effects of an anæsthetic. Gradually, as the stupor wore off, she became aware of the objects around her; of the hissing gas jet, which burned in the daytime; of the dirty carpet, with an ink splotch in the centre; of the unsteady washstand that creaked under its own weight; of the stale ashes of a cigar in the top of the soap dish; of the sharp ridge down the middle of the bed on which she was lying. And she thought clearly, "No matter how bad it is, I've got to go through with it."