All of the day following she lay with her face buried into her pillow, abandoning herself utterly to creature discomfort. Toward evening she ventured down as far as Fourteenth Street for a bowl of milk and toast, but the pain raged on, tightening her throat against food, and she crept back to the haven of her cheek to Mrs. McMurtrie's scorched pillow slip. After another two nights of local application and the rather futile business of holding warm water in the sag of her cheek, she found out, at the direction of Mrs. McMurtrie, a neighborhood dentist who occupied a suite of rooms over a corner drug store, the large grinning picture of a boy, with a delighted hiatus of missing front tooth, painted on each window and giltly inscribed, "It Didn't Hurt a Bit." It is inconceivable, except that under duress of great pain Lilly could have engaged services so obviously quasi professional, but she was past that perception by now, her nerves from brow to shoulder crackling like a bonfire. Examination by a dentist with gray pointed side whiskers that flared and brushed her cheek unpleasantly, revealed a pair of abscesses gathering within the gum, and for weeks of mornings she lay back to the agony of steel incisions, for the remainder of the day stretching out on her iron bedstead, face to wall. Then for a few days a premature spring came out teasingly. The East Seventeenth Street block, with its rows of houses, going down none too debonairly, from gentility to senility, showing a bud here and there. There even remained one private residence with a polished door bell and name plate and a little cluster of crocuses in an iron jardiniere set out in a front yard about the dimension of an army blanket. Crocuses, whose cold, moist smell, with all the pungency of associations an odor can arouse, somehow suggested, to Lilly, Taylor Avenue and little Harry Calvert. She did not remember it, but Harry had once stolen two satiny red ones for her from a Taylor Avenue flower bed and been soundly cuffed by a housewife. A block away, Gramercy Park, a rectangle of the Knickerbocker New York of the woodcut, red-brick sidewalk, salon parlor, and crystal chandelier, was already lacy with the first leafwork of spring. Several times, when the sun lay warmest, Lilly ventured into its Old World sobriety, strolling around the tall grill fence that inclosed the park. It was locked against the public, nursemaids from surrounding homes and a few old ladies stiff with gentility holding keys. Children from the raggedy fringe of Third Avenue played without awareness, against the outside of the iron palings, too young, and, anyway, too imprisoned in class, to resent one more monopoly even of God's sunshine and the brown, warm earth already swollen with life about to be.