Her mouth was full of tears ... good tears, for they were warm. She was aware of her feet, down there, cold ... lumps that denied herself for she was living warm. She lay on the iron bed. She slept. * * * * * From heavy sleep Fanny awoke exhausted. Her eyes opening were broken by a world cutting in, sharp and strange world of impossible impacts, which somehow had been away. She lifted her stiff weight from bed, she had slept in her clothes. She remembered the warm world wrapping sudden about her in the night bringing her sleep. She looked at the cold lamp, at the rust-stained bluish stove on the floor.--Where is it?... She took off her clothes, knowing that she must bathe in cold water. Her body thirsted. There was another world ... an imperious imagining ... to blot the real within her. World, world, world! The voice in her was small.--I lose myself. I go forth breaking against cold and stone. She was athirst for water. The bite of the water on her flesh was good ... it made the world she must face realler. It bit under her arms and over her throat, it drew like a knife between her legs. It made her fingers wool.... --I am a sunny girl getting ready to ride with Harry. Warm good feeling ... riding and laughing! The pear blossoms are out!... A dismal room with its grey bulged walls and its patched pipings. About the bathtub in which lay her naked flesh, a stained and rusted bathtub, the floor was matted with cold oilcloth, colorless with many feet. Now under her gay ones! --Come!... a dim hall, reeking with night-shadows still, plethoric as if it had swallowed too much darkness, quenched the white shoulders of Fanny Dirk. “I hold you,” it seemed to say. “I am this dingy house and I am putting you out.” She shut the door behind her. The street. She took it in, bravely forcing herself to know that it was new: she had never seen it. There was a clarity about her. The world was a delirium carved, a frenzy frozen and sculpted. Only within her was dimness of soft flesh. The street was empty. Piles of snow, color of drowned rats, lay in the gutters. A cat moved gaunt. The two rows of houses stood even, scraping the sky. They were damp-soiled scabs ... brown red ... they held their secrets as dry blood holds a wound. They hated the grey wideness which they scraped at above them, clutching with pitiful flourish of eave and chimney at a buried sun. Fanny walked. Her feet struck the pavement. She felt how she touched the street. A thing deep terrible living her feet touched as she walked. It gave to her footfall, it did not rise in response. --Tear off the scab Blood would gush! “I had better buy rolls.” She pressed her one nickel in her palm. She would have money that night.