In mid-afternoon Paula obeyed an impulse to call upon Madame Nestor. She wanted to talk with the only human being in New York who could quite understand. Madame's room was west of Eighth Avenue in Forty-fourth Street--the servant's quarter in a squalid suite, four flights up. The single window opened upon a dim shaft, heavy with emanations from many kitchens. There was not even a closet. Madame's moulted plumage was hung upon the back of the outer and only door. Books were everywhere, on the floor, in boxes, on the cot. "My dear Paula, you felt the need of me?... I should have come to you. This does very well for me, but I dislike my poverty to be known, dear. It is not that I am the least proud, but the psychic effects of pity are depressing." "Please, Madame Nestor, don't think of me pitying anybody! I did feel the need of you. The day has been horrible. But first, I want to tell you that I am very sorry for what I said--when you were in my rooms the other day----" The elder woman leaned forward and kissed Paula's dress at the shoulder. There was something sweet and mild and devotional in the action, something suggestive of a wise old working-bee pausing an instant to caress its queen. "You have been impelled to go to him, Paula?" "Yes. It came over me quite irresistibly. I could not have been altogether myself.... I think I shall leave the city!" Madame Nestor asked several questions, bringing out all she cared to know of Paula's experience that day. Her eyes became very bright as she said: "I dare not advise you _not_ to go away. Still, don't you see it--how wonderful was your victory to-day?" "I can't always defeat him!" Paula cried. "His power comes over me and I move toward him--just as reptiles must follow a blind impulse started from without. Each time I follow, I must be weaker." "But, Paula, each time something happens to restore you to yourself, thwarting his purpose, his projections are weakened." "But if I should go far away?" "He could only put it in your mind to return." When Paula remembered the accidents which had preserved her, even when in the same city with the Destroyer, she could not doubt the salvation in putting a big stretch of the planet's curve between her and this dynamo.... Certain unfinished thinking could only be cleared through a friend like Madame Nestor. "This physical consciousness which he has made me feel seems indescribably more sinister in erect human beings than the mating instinct in animals and birds," Paula declared with hesitation. "Can it be that women in general encounter influences--of this kind?"