I put on my best dress at once and got into the limousine. Half the neighborhood was out watching. I leaned back in the upholstered seat, fairly quivering with excitement. This was Alma's car; that was Alma's card-case; the little clock had her monogram on it. Even the flowers in the flower holder, yellow tulips, reminded me of Alma--a trifle showy, but good to look at! And I was going to her house! I was not taken to the main entrance, but to a side door. The queer dream-like feeling was still there. In this back hall, relegated from the more conspicuous part of the house, there were even pieces of furniture from the old home, and my father's picture, in an oval gilt frame, hung over my head. I had not seen a picture of him for twenty years. I went over and touched it gently. "Father, father!" I said. Under it was the tall hall chair that I had climbed over as a child, and had stood on many times, to see myself in the mirror above. The chair was newly finished and looked the better for its age. I glanced in the old glass. The chair had stood time better than I. I was a middle-aged woman, lined with poverty and care, shabby, prematurely gray, a little hard. I had thought my father an old man when that picture was taken, and now I was even older. "Father!" I whispered again, and fell to crying in the dimly lighted hall. Lida sent for me at once. I had only time to dry my eyes and straighten my hat. Had I met Alma on the stairs, I would have passed her without a word. She would not have known me. But I saw no one. Lida was in bed. She was lying there with a rose-shaded lamp beside her, and a great bowl of spring flowers on a little stand at her elbow. She sat up when I went in, and had a maid place a chair for me beside the bed. She looked very childish, with her hair in a braid on the pillow, and her slim young arms and throat bare. "I'm so glad you came!" she said, and would not be satisfied until the light was just right for my eyes, and my coat unfastened and thrown open. "I'm not really ill," she informed me. "I'm--I'm just tired and nervous, and--and unhappy, Mrs. Pitman." "I am sorry," I said. I wanted to lean over and pat her hand, to draw the covers around her and mother her a little,--I had had no one to mother for so long,--but I could not. She would have thought it queer and presumptuous--or no, not that. She was too sweet to have thought that. "Mrs. Pitman," she said suddenly, "_who was_ this Jennie Brice?" "She was an actress. She and her husband lived at my house." "Was she--was she beautiful?" "Well," I said slowly, "I never thought of that. She was handsome, in a large way." "Was she young?" "Yes. Twenty-eight or so." "That isn't very young," she said, looking relieved. "But I don't think men like very young women. Do you?" "I know one who does," I said, smiling. But she sat up in bed suddenly and looked at me with her clear childish eyes. "I don't want him to like me!" she flashed. "I--I want him to hate me."