She felt shattered, ready to scream if anyone touched her, like someone with an open wound. But she held herself tightly in check. She rode aimlessly on the subway for an hour or two. She stood in bookshops with a volume in her hands and stared at the pages until the clerks, in turn, stared at her. She sat on benches in Central Park. She stopped now and then to get a cup of coffee, and late in the day, a sandwich. It enabled her to keep walking. She walked, looking at nothing but the pavement ahead of her, for a couple of hours. She paid no attention to where she was going or why. She walked to exhaust herself, to reach that country of fatigue where even the mind cannot operate and the emotions are dead. Abruptly she found herself standing outside the McAlton in the last hour of daylight. She was not strong enough to feel surprise. On the contrary, it was as if she had been working toward it, all through that empty endless day, knowing she would end up here. And knowing, she had not needed to think of it, to make a decision. It was unavoidable. She stood outside the main door to the lobby, looking at the people hurrying past and hoping somebody would come up to her, talk to her, even make advances to her. Anything to postpone what she knew was coming. She looked at the door and away again, and then back to it, as if it were a great sinister magnet. Sooner or later she knew she would walk through it. She stood leaning against the gray stone of the McAlton, her fine face pale and vacant, her body apparently relaxed. She looked like a tired young career girl, waiting at the appointed place for a date. She knew it and took advantage of it. The hotel doorman strolled over to her and said, “Lovely evening, isn’t it?” And later, “Looks like he’s a bit late, Miss.” With a little smile. Laura returned the smile faintly. She tried to engage him in conversation, but he was called away frequently, and finally, with the evening crowd converging on him, got too busy to talk to her at all. The night was violet now, turning fast to black. It was eight o’clock. Laura turned to the door and walked through it almost automatically. Once inside she was suddenly profoundly afraid. Flashes of fear went through her; long sweeps of tremors and gooseflesh. She didn’t bother with the desk this time. She knew what floor he was on. She got the elevator and said, “Fourteenth floor, please.” She wondered if her voice sounded as shaky as it felt in her throat. She thought of simply getting off the elevator on the fourteenth floor and taking another elevator right back down. And when she was let off, she stood there in the deep carpeted hall with her heart crying “No-no, no-no, no-no,” at every beat.