She consumed cigarette after cigarette, without tasting or enjoying a single one, and her eyes were bloodshot with the smart of straying smoke. It was a purely mechanical process, a device to assist thought or to prevent it--she was not sure which. At least the narcotic had a soothing effect on her overwrought nerves, and having something to manipulate with her fingers kept her within certain materialistic bounds. The same applied to the stiff whisky-and-soda she had mixed herself; half of it was still in the glass beside her--she had gulped half of it down, and had not touched the rest since. A queer, hectically coloured jazz-pattern mind had this slim, fluffily beautiful girl. Now those jazz-patterns had kaleidoscoped into a medley of nightmare imaginings. The only light in the room came from the red-shaded reading lamp behind her head, and the shadows around her, with their crimson high-lights, grouped themselves into the real semblance of her dire grotesque visions. She would have sold the world for company at that hour, for the comforting presence of someone strong and calm and friendly who'd hold her in his arms and scare away the bogeys with a cheery word. Jimmy, for instance. In those last few days he'd shown a sympathy one wouldn't have suspected him of possessing and a strength of character which was the last thing on earth an ex-jailbird waster ought by rights to have trumped out. Or Storm would have done. She wished she'd made him stay--bar Jimmy, he was the only man who'd ever had a kind word for her, who'd ever treated her four-square, with no _arrière-pensée_. And the realisation that she no longer felt capable of standing on her own feet and facing things out alone was the hardest of all to bear--she, the ice-hearted, cool, calculating adventuress, was getting soft; while even jelly-spined sops like Jimmy were suddenly sprouting shells. The fact that Jimmy's new-found backbone had awakened in her a genuine respect--something that was tending to passionate love--didn't enter into the balance sheet for the moment. There were weaknesses and tender patches in her armour that she'd never encountered before, and the discovery of them was a salutary lesson to conceit. Joan failed to derive any enjoyment from the revelation. Shock education takes some standing up to. She preferred the Montessori system. Anyway, all recrimination and sentiment aside, the fact remained that she felt intolerably lonely and unhappy. For the second time in her life she was utterly sincere, and she was unable to decide whether her primary reaction to this unaccustomed attitude was shame or--fright. Not, of course, that she figured the whole thing out in such a precise scientific manner. Her introspection ran on lines which combined the antics of a giant switchback and a roundabout, but the general trend of them was much simpler.