“It’s all right....” A moment Clara smiled. Then her eyes looked within, they met the eyes of Fanny deeply in a far space where they were not apart. “Good-by.” --There is love in you. Love, love. What wisdom? You are not saying, Good-by. You are saying, Love! Fanny was still. And alone. * * * * * Without turning she walked. Swift walking. She was aware of herself walking swift beneath the Elevated trains, and of not moving at all. She did not like this shadowy way with lights upon the sides of it like little creatures burning to get in. It was full of noise and heaviness and booming steel. A side street ... quieter, cold ... swung to her face. Southward again. But now an Avenue all open to the stars. The tall buildings rose melting into mist. Stars flickered faint over the stillness of their pointed thrusts. They rose from stone, rigid, equal: a stone City lay before her and the houses stood one stuff with the hard death beneath her feet. Men and women, like house, like street, passed on: wrapped in stone muffledness. They were muffled in dim rigor. They were masked. The City was masked. Corner of wall soaring, clusters of passers-by, the buzz of motors pulling with rubbered gait through the damp asphalt ... were features of a Mask. She felt its stillness, its stifled comfort: underneath, a heated flesh she could not touch. Her feet, beating the street, beat with her eyes and soul against the Mask of a world. It was unrolling. Sharp stone towers swathed in blue mist, private mansions mansard-roofed, façade of church, flourish of store with its show-windows alight like gems set in the pallor of the night ... masked, hid away. She was unmoving while the dominant procession pressed before her. And the men and women, sparse, impervious, aloof, were details of the pageant that defiled. Yet it seemed to Fanny she beheld an act deeply ceremonial, religious. The high masked world ... human and stone ... became a chant, lifted in stilled ecstasy unto some god.... Her room was outside all this. The gas jet she lit stood on the whitewashed wall, made it orange, made shadow of bureau and chair stand stiff like marionettes ... stiffly agile ... upon the orange glare. She was shut in: the pageant and the hymn to a lost god were far away. Yet now in the room it was to her as if she stood at a window. She looked out secure upon the song and pageant of the world.... --I am very quiet. A terrible thing has come to me. I have met Clara, the one person in the world who knows of me and cares ... and I have sent her away. A terrible thing has taken place. I am quiet.