She was alone in a twelfth-story room that enhanced her aerial sense of light-headedness. She looked at the bed. Curly birch with a fine sense of depth to its whiteness. There was a glass top on the dresser, with a lace scarf beneath it which appealed to her sense of novelty. Also an extra light above it which she jerked on, peering at herself in the mirror. There were soot rims about her eyes, and when she removed her hat her hair was glued to her brow in its outline. But just the same, the pollen that gave to her skin its velvetiness was there. She leaned to the mirror, baring her teeth to scan their whiteness; turned her profile as if to appraise its strong, sure cast; swelled her chest after the manner of inhaling for an octave, letting her hand ride on it. Then she undressed slowly, luxuriating in a deep hot bath that rested her as she lay back in it. She even washed her hair, wrapping it finally in one of the thick turkish towels, and then leaned out of her window for a while, her body well over the sill, and the air, with a cool washed quality to it, flowing through her nightdress. She looked down on what she thought must be the bosom of Broadway. Actually it was Forty-fourth Street. An ocean of roofs billowed under her gaze. She thought of Tuefelsdroeck alone with his stars. Or rather, wanted to think of herself as thinking of him. A telephone directory on the desk caught her eye. For an hour she pored over its pages, names that had blazoned themselves incandescently from the pages of musical reviews and magazines mixed in casually with the clayey ones of mere persons. A thrill shot over her with each encounter. The book began to exhale an odor of sanctity. It was two o'clock when she turned off her lights, just enough glow from the hallway pressing against her transom to reassure her. The sheets were fragrant with cleanliness and she let her body give to the delicious sag of the mattress. The rumble of the train was gone from her ears. She felt washed, light, drowsy; cast aside her pillow; wound her arm up under her head; sighed out of deliciousness; slept. She awoke with a sense of red. A flame of fear shot through her, and a first thought of fire, but even before she could rise she saw it was static, this crimson gash across the blackness, and shaped like a grin. She began to tremble, and an unreasoning fear of the depth of the darkness to take hold of her. A sort of paralysis locked her, and, although she wanted to scream, she lay there drenched in terror. Finally, out of contempt for her fear, she sprang, landing both feet on the floor.