Then, sitting up, she composed herself, and with deft fingers completed the adjustment of her garments. By the time she had finished her toilet, aided by a small mirror inset between the forward windows, Butch was stopping the cab before the East Seventy-sixth Street tenement. Bending back, he unlatched the door and swung it open. "You go on up," he ordered. "I'll be around before long--gotta run this machine back to the garage." Joan stepped quickly to the sidewalk, and shut the door. "All right," she responded, and added, almost timidly, avoiding her brother's eyes: "Thank you, Butch." He grunted unintelligibly and, as Joan moved up the stoop, threw in the power again and drew swiftly away down the street. For an instant Joan held back in the vestibule, sickened to recognize anew the home of dirt and squalor she had fled, a long lifetime since, it seemed, and struggling with almost invincible repugnance for the ordeal awaiting her at the head of those five weary flights. Then, more through instinct than of her will, her finger pressed the call-button beneath the Thursby letter box. The latch clicked. She pushed the door open, moved reluctantly into the shadows and addressed herself wearily to the stairs, inhaling with a keen physical disgust the heavy and malodorous atmosphere in which her youth had been shaped toward womanhood. As the dining-room door admitted her, she checked again, almost tempted to question the soundness of those faculties which insisted that more than a year had passed, rather than an hour or two, since she had left that mean and sordid place. Above the dining-table blazed and wheezed a single gas-jet, whose ragged bluish flame was yet sufficiently strong to turn to the colour of night the dull dawnlight outside the air-shaft windows. It revealed to her not a single article of furniture other than as memory placed it, and showed her, seated on the far side of the table, her father lifting a heavy and sullen face from the note-book between his soiled fat fingers, that inevitable sheaf of dope lying at his elbow. There was no sort of greeting, in proper sense, between these two. For a little neither spoke. Joan hesitated, with shoulders against the panels of the door, in an attitude instinctively defiant and defensive. Thursby looked her up and down, a louring sneer marking his recognition of his daughter's finery. Suddenly, explosively, she found her tongue: "How's ma?" Thursby jerked a thumb in the direction of the bedrooms. "She died an hour ago," he said slowly, "just after Ed went to find you. Edna's in there." Joan made a gesture of horror. "My God!" she said throatily, and turned away. A moment later, loud cries of lamentation ringing through the flat testified that she had found her sister. XXXVII