"Don't lose your head, Lilly," she admonished of self. "There is a way, only you haven't yet struck it. Don't let your brain feel trapped. Keep cool. Quiet. Dove. Peace. Cathedral. Sweet and low. Sweet and low. Neugass. No. Gertrude Kirk. No, no! If only Mrs. McMurtrie--Indigent Girls--No--no--no!" However, after a while she did turn back through toward Second Avenue, her feet quickened with a destination she could not bring herself to admit, and so she loitered, inquiring at three more front doors which had now come to have an angry scowl for her as she mounted their front steps. Between a Home for Lithuanian Aged and a Swedish bakery and lunch room that she had more than once frequented, a black-and-gold sign spanned what at one time had been the noncommittal front of a stately residence--"Nonsectarian Home for Indigent Girls." Ascending these steps, she could feel the glance of every passer-by boring into the very back of her head, awls crawling through and through her. She tried to drag her hat down over her eyes. Her black velvet sailor, modish enough when new, had suffered somewhat in the hurried packing off of her things after her. The buckram rim, misshapen from too close quarters, flared rather outlandishly off her face, so that after she had pulled the bell she stood with her back to the sidewalk, while the sign above seared into her. Induced by the warmth of the day and the bundle of blanket she carried, a pox of perspiration had burst out on her face, but the little whimperings against her heart had died down so that she dared not risk the jolt of reaching for her handkerchief. She was admitted finally into one of the large salon parlors that had lost its beauty as a woman can lose hers. Stripped of the jewels of crystal chandeliers, long mirrors, and glittering floors, it remained now a gaunt strip of room, divided by a low fence and swinging gate into office and waiting room. There were long windows that looked out upon the polyglot of Second Avenue, which even then, over a not quite abandoned elegance, was donning its Joseph's coat of seventeen nationalities and dining, bartering, and gesticulating in as many languages. On a strip of bench between the windows Lilly sat and waited.