Lilly watched her friend pass down the narrow hall, then she closed the door. Left alone, she crossed to the window and leaned out well beyond the casement--a _Demoiselle_ whose three lilies were despair, anger, and fear. The stagnant air, savored with frying pork, weighted her down with its humidity; her brow puckered into tiny lines. Do not, reader, construe this setting too lightly. The most pungent essay in all literature is devoted to the succulency of roast pig; Sappho was most lyric after she had rubbed her wine goblet with garlic-flavored ewe meat. But such kindly reflection was not Lilly's--fleshpots and life alike were unsavory. The Nottingham lace curtains hung limp and motionless round her, and waves of heat deflected from the asphalt came up heavy as fog. Three stories beneath, Third Avenue spluttered on the griddle of a merciless August--an exhausted day was duskening into a scarcely less kind twilight; she could feel the brick wall of the building exhaling like a furnace. It was characteristic of Lilly that, with the thermometer up in three figures and her own mental mercury well toward the top of the tube, she should strike the one note of relief in a Saharan aridness. She suggested the drip of clear water in a grotto or the inmost petals of a tight-closed rose. If her throat ached and strained to keep down the tears, her neck, where the sheer white collar fell away, was cold and chaste; if anger and resentment were pounding through her veins the fresh firmness of her flesh did not betray it. She leaned her head against the window-frame and looked down with a certain remoteness upon the human caldron three stories removed. Lights were beginning to prick out wanly; the bang and clang of humanity, distant, but none the less insistent, came up to her in a medley of street-car clangs, shouts, and hum-hum. Children cried. Upon a fire-escape level with her own window a child, with bare feet extended over the iron rail, slept on an improvised bed; from the interior of that same apartment came the wail of a sick infant. A woman nude to the waist passed to and fro before the open window, crooning to the bundle she carried in the crook of her arm. Lilly's mouth hung at the corners. Came darkness, she passed out into the kitchen and covered the slow-cooking chops with a tin lid, lighted the gas-jet, turning the flame down into a mere bead, and resumed her watch at the front window.