They were coming into the city now, in a dusk rich with twinkling lights. In the car the passengers were stirring. Amy stood up to be brushed--sleek and alluring, worldly wise--and the fat man in the chair behind her opened wide his heavy eyes. Then Ethel stood up--and in the poise of her figure, slim and lithe with its lovely lines, in her carriage, in her slender neck, in her dark face with its features clear, her lips a little parted, and in the look in her brown eyes--there was something which made glances turn from all down the softly lighted car. There was even a brief silence. And Ethel drew a sudden breath, as from close behind her the soft voice of the darky porter drawled: "Yes'm--yes'm--dis is New York. We's comin' right into de station now." CHAPTER II "Well, Ethel my love, we're here at last! . . . It must be after midnight. I wonder when I'll get to sleep? . . . Not that I care especially. What a quaint habit sleeping is." She had formed the habit long ago of holding these inner conversations. Her father had been a silent man, and often as she faced him at meals Ethel had talked and talked to herself in quite as animated a way as though she were saying it all aloud. Now she sat up suddenly in bed and turned on the light just over her head, and amiably she surveyed her room. It was a pretty, fresh, little room with flowered curtains, a blue rug, a luxurious chaise longue and a small French dressing table. Very cheerful, very empty. "It looks," she decided, "just like the bed feels. I'm the first fellow who has been here. "No," she corrected herself in a moment, "that's very ignorant of you, my dear. This is a New York apartment, you know. All kinds of other fellows have been in this room ahead of me; and they've lain awake by the hour here, planning how to get married or divorced, or getting ready to write a great book or make a million dollars, or sing in grand opera or murder their child. All the things in the newspapers have been arranged in this spot where I lie! Now I'll turn out the light," she added, "and sink quietly to rest!" But in the dark she lay listening to the strange low hub-hub from outside. And it made her think of what she had seen an hour before, when at the open window, resting her elbows on the sill, she had begun to make her acquaintance with her backyard--a yawning abyss of brick and cement which went down and down to cement below, and up and up to a strip of blue sky, and to right and to left went stretching away with rows and rows of windows. And now as the murmurs and quick low cries, piano music, a baritone voice and a sudden burst of laughter, came to her ears, she gravely named her neighbours: "Wives and husbands, divorcees, secret lovers, grafters, burglars, suffragettes, actresses and anarchists and millionaires and poor young things--all spending a quiet evening at home. And that's so sensible in you all. You'll need your strength for tomorrow."