She knew that Nita did not answer, at least not in words. Gradually talk died down; weary bodies stretched their aching length upon hard, sagging cots. Someone turned out the sputtering gas jet that had ineffectually illuminated the dress tent. Groans subsided into snores or whistling, adenoidal breathing. A sudden breeze tugged at the loose sides of the tent, slapping the canvas loudly against the wooden stakes that held it down. Although she was so tired that her muscles quivered and jerked spasmodically, Sally found that she could not sleep. As if her mind were a motion-picture screen, the events of the day marched past, in very bad sequence, like an unassembled film. She saw her own small figure flitting across the screen fantastically clad in purple satin trousers and green jacket, her face and arms brown as an Indian’s, her eyes shielded by a little black lace veil. Crowds of farmers, their wives, their children; small-town business men, their wives and giggling daughters and goggle-eyed sons, avid for a glimpse of the naughtiness which the barker promised behind the tent flap of the “girlie show,” pressed in upon her, receded, pressed again, thrust out quarters, demanded magic visions of her— David, his eyes streaming with onion tears, smiling at her. David reading that dreadful newspaper story—David of yesterday, saying, “Dear little Sally!” pressing her against him for a blessed minute— And Nita, her eyes rabid with sudden, ugly passion—passion for David—Nita threatening her, threatening David— David, David! The movie stopped with a jerk, then resolved itself into an enormous “close-up” of David Nash, his eyes smiling into hers with infinite gentleness and tenderness. “Does he think I’m just a little girl, too young to—to be in love or to be loved?” she asked herself, audacious in the dark. “If—if he was at all in love with me—but oh, he couldn’t be!—would he be so friendly and easy with me? Wouldn’t he be embarrassed, and blush, and—and things like that? Oh, I’m just being silly! He doesn’t think of me at all except as a little girl who’s in trouble. A girl alone, as he calls me.” Then a new memory banished even the “close-up” of David on the screen of her mind—a memory called up by those words—“girl alone.” She felt that she ought to weep with shame and contrition because she had so long half-forgotten Mrs. Bybee’s promise to make inquiries about her mother—the mother who had given her to the orphanage twelve years before, leaving behind her only a meager record—“Mrs. Nora Ford, aged twenty-eight.”