The movement of the room coagulated about the figure of a woman seated at a desk on the office side of the partition. Girls, to Lilly it seemed a whole phantasmagoria of identical ones with short hair and eyes none too young, passed in and out of the little swinging gate. Suddenly it struck her, with such a wrench that she almost cried out, that here was no illusion. They were uniformed, these girls. In dark-blue cotton stuff, with three rows of white tape running around the skirt hem and white bone buttons up the back. Through the doorway one of them was washing down a flight of stairs, raising a cold, soap-and-lye smell. Another, with a splay smile that was terrible as a wound, wiped in and out among the spokes of the banisters, her face as without muscle as a squeezed orange, and smiling without knowing that it smiled. Sitting there with her bundle closer and closer to her heart, Lilly closed her eyes to that smile. Above all, she knew that she needed to keep clear, and yet across the swept horizon she tried to create, silhouettes of thought such as these would move, fantastic as cloud shapes. "Who am I?" And then, with her old untrained probing after reality: "How do I know I am not dreaming? Where am I going? What is it I want? How terrible! Me, Lilly Becker. This place is like the poorhouse at home, that time the High School sociology class visited it. Zoe, are you real? Mine alone! Not his. Mine. You must be the miracle and show me the way, Zoe. You shall be me plus everything that I am not. To have missed the ecstasy of you is not to have lived. If Auchinloss could hear me now. Who knows? I may, yet. What if I am like Joan of Arc, heeding a vision, only I don't know which way the vision is pointing. Funny. Oh, but I'm going to clear the way for you, Zoe. No Chinese shoes for your little feet or your little brain. Free--to choose--to be! That's the way I'll rear my daughter. My daughter! Queer I never think of him, her father. Zoe--what if you don't want to be saved from what I'm saving you. The fatness--the sedentary spirit of--out there. But you are me plus everything that I am not. You will want to be saved. You will." It was out of this limbo that Lilly was finally summoned, through the little swing door to an empty chair beside the desk. She thought she had never beheld such eyes as were turned upon her through polished eyeglasses with the complement of a wide black-ribbon guard. They were the color of slate and cleaned for impression. The eight cases that had preceded Lilly were gone from them just as the eight cases to follow would erase one by one. "Sit down," she said. Then, "Girl or boy?" "Girl." "Name?" "Zoe. Oh, you mean my name? Let me explain. You must understand that I am not--indigent. I am looking for a room. I've just come out of the hospital with my little one, and you have no idea how difficult it is to find lodging where there is a child." "What is your name?"