"How dare you! You cheat! You miserable creature! How dare you! You come near me and I'll call the police. Let me out of here! Out!" She ran from the place with her hat in her hand, across the street, and up two flights to her room. Panting and drenched with perspiration, all day she lay on the little iron bed, her face to the wall, shuddering. "O God, where are you driving me? What are you driving me on for? Where? Why? What does it mean?" At dusk, with a sense of weakness entirely new to her, she rose to undress, resting after each discarded piece of clothing. She could hear Mrs. McMurtrie passing through the outer hall, a tin bucket, on one of its frequent errands to Joe's place across the street, grating against the wall. The room took on a deeper and soupy color of twilight, the great pachyderm of the Hanna Larchmont Hospital casting its shadow. Suddenly, one of those boltlike perceptions that can spring out apparently from space, Lilly clapped her hands to her throat, her breast, the back of her neck. Her bag, the little chamois bag, and the pink ribbon at her neck were gone! She shook through her clothing in a frenzy of haste; she tore each piece inside out; slapped her hands over the washstand; flung back her mattress, plunging her fingers into every imaginable crevice. Dragged out the bed; jerked up the tacks from the carpet, turning back the corners; felt along the dark, narrow halls and down two flights on her hands and knees; shook out her clothing again. The hair came down over her shoulders and her reasoning seemed to go. That hand fumbling to untie that bib-towel. Those pointed whiskers approaching her cheek. The little pink bow at her neck. Those liverlike lips. That soft, boneless hand at the back of her neck had jerked out the bag! O God! that soft, slimy kiss and the little jerk of the bow at the back of her neck! and fell down with a screaming that brought Mrs. McMurtrie. At noon of the next day Lilly Penny lay in the public ward of the Hanna Larchmont Lying-in Hospital, a premature mother by some weeks. Lilly Penny, whose trousseau had included twelve of the sheerest batiste ones, in a coarse, unbleached nightdress not her own and the least gentle to her flesh she had ever known. There was a row of her of which she was the whitest; wan women, big-eyed with pain, who had gone down into the canons of death that there might be life.