He was looking at her. Looking straight at her, as if he had been following her through the crowd with his eyes, not quite sure but wondering. For a split second Laura didn’t believe it; thought he didn’t really see her and was just looking that way. But then he cried, “Laura!” in his big rough voice, and her eyes went huge with fear and she gasped and turned and ran as if the devil were after her. She ran headlong, panicky, her heart huge and desperate, struggling to get out of her throat. She ran with all her strength and with an unreasoning terror whipping her heels, all the way to the subway. She never once looked back. People turned to stare, they jumped out of the way and she collided with a dozen of them. She almost fell down the subway steps and ran and dodged and shoved her way into the ladies’ rest room. There, she fell on the floor, whimpering, crying despairingly, unable to lift herself off the filth of the black floor and completely unaware of anything but the hysterical fear that gripped her. After a while she felt hands on her shoulders and she gave a wild scream and sat up. A terrified Negress was bending over her, saying, “There now, there now.” Her eyes were all whites. Laura panted, speechless, gasping for breath. She leaned exhausted against the door of a booth until her wind came back to her and then she tried to get up. The Negro woman helped her, handling her like heirloom china, watching her every second for fear she would take off on another fit. Laura half staggered to the wash basin and turned the water on. She looked at her haggard face in the mirror and an attack of real crying, soothing relief with real tears, overwhelmed her. “Father, Father, Father,” she cried softly, her face in her hands. “Can I help you, Miss?” the colored woman asked. She was scared by Laura’s behavior, but fascinated. Laura shook her head. After a moment’s pause the woman said, “You came in here like a bat out of hell. You was out of your mind, honey, that’s for sure. Was some sonofabitch chasin’ you?” Laura put her hands down to look at the woman in the cracked mirror over the basin. She nodded. “Well, I never seen a girl so scared in my life. Never.” She shook her head positively. “You better get yourself some help, honey. Is he still out there?” At this Laura went so white that she frightened the woman again, who said, “There now, there now. Didn’t mean to start nothin’. Don’t go off like that again.” Laura turned around to look at her. And in her awful unhappiness she went to her and put her arms around her, to the bottomless astonishment of the woman, and wept on her shoulder. “I never had a mother,” Laura sobbed. “I never had a mother.” And her heart was broken. The woman held her like a child and said, “There now, there now. Everybody’s got a mother, even you.” “Nobody knows me. I don’t even know myself. I don’t know what I’m doing here,” she said brokenly. “I’m a stranger in this world.”