"'Ought to go alone?--ought to go alone?'--I am so tired of that phrase 'ought to go alone'!" said Hagar. "At Gilead Balm they said, 'Don't go beyond the Mile-and-a-Half Cedar!' You say yourself that I couldn't get lost, and I was brought up with Thomasine, and Jim and his wife are perfectly good people." Downstairs, as she was passing the parlour doors, Mrs. Maine called to her from within. "Where are you going, dear?" Hagar entered and explained. "That is very nice of you to look her up, but do you think you ought to go alone?" Hagar explained that, too; whereupon Mrs. Maine patted her hand and told her to trot along, but always to be careful! As the front door closed after her, her hostess resumed her box of chocolates and the baby sacque she was knitting. "It isn't as though I had promised to give her, or to make Rachel give her, continual chaperonage! To look after her in a general way is all that could possibly be expected. Besides, it's foolish always to be nervous about people!" She took a chocolate cream and began the sleeve. "Medway Ashendyne, with all those millions, isn't doing very much for her. She couldn't dress more plainly if she tried. I wonder what he means to do with her eventually. Perhaps he doesn't mean anything--just to let things drift...." Hagar knew how to orientate herself very well. She took the surface car going in the right direction, and when she had travelled some distance she left it and took a cross-town car. This brought her to the block she wished. Out of the jingling car, across a street of push-carts and drays and hurrying, dodging people, she stood upon the broken and littered pavement a moment to look about her. The houses were tall and dreary; once good, a house to a family, but now not so good, and several families to a house. The corners were occupied by larger buildings, unadorned and jerry-built and ugly, each with a high-sounding name, each containing "flats";--flats and flats and flats, each with its ground floor occupied by small stores--unprosperous greengrocer, unprosperous butcher, poor chemist, prosperous saloon, and what not. It was a grimy, chilly grey afternoon with more than a hint of the approaching winter. All voices seemed raw and all colours cold. Among the children playing on the pavement and in areaways or on high, broken, entrance steps, there sounded more crying than laughing. Dirty papers were blown up and down; there floated an odour of stale beer; an old-clothes man went by, ringing a bell and crying harshly, "Old clothes! Old clothes! Got any rags?" Hagar stood with contracted brows. She shivered a little. "Why, Thomasine should not live in a place like this!" She looked about her. "Who should?" She had a vision of Thomasine playing ring-around-a-rosy, Thomasine looking for four-leaved clovers.