"At last!" she muttered, closing her eyes with a little sigh when, having paid off the taxi, she stood in the elevator of the Swansea. As she let the packages slide from her arms into the armchair in the living room, she felt a crushing sense of loneliness. She poured the orangered persimmons into a blue bowl on the teatable. How beautiful they are. If I only had someone to show them to. She threw herself into a bustle of preparations for supper. She lit two burners in the kitchenette. Toast and boiled eggs and then I'll go to bed with a book. The usualness of the smell of the gas-burners and boiling water and toast oppressed her. Was she going to spend all her life puttering about that miserable kitchenette? If I were at Aunt M.'s in the little room I had when I was a child it would be cosy to be made a fuss over and have breakfast brought up to me in bed by Mary Ann in the morning. After supper she remembered she hadn't looked at the letters she had brought up from the mailbox. One from Salinski, what on earth? Dear Miss Taylor: It is with infinite regret that I must announce to you that on account of great and pressing business I shall be forced to omit your next three lessons, making our following engagement for January 26.... I know what that means. He's losing interest in me. He can't treat me like that. I'll phone him. He has no right not to explain what he means. She went to the phone and jerked off the receiver. Then she put it back weakly and burst into tears. O, I'm all distraught this evening. How horribly silly. I'll go to bed and read. Once in bed, in her white bedroom, with the reading light over her shoulder and the rest of the room in cosy shadow and the persimmons in their blue bowl on a chair within reach, she began to feel calmer. She lay a long while staring at the ceiling with Locke's Beloved Vagabond unopened in her hand. Is it just that I'm feeling low this evening, or is everything crumbling, breaking down to let in the floods of platitude the way the noise of pianolas seeps in through apartment-house walls?