Now really the worst danger of detection was over. She saw no reason why
a woman with a small hat and a hand-bag should not pass for a
school-teacher. Indeed, the men did let her go at that, but the
women--women with shawls over their heads, and women with uncovered
heads and ear-rings in their ears, and thin, weak-eyed women with bags
in their hands--the teachers themselves, one of whom she hoped to pass
for--all stared at her. It didn't matter much, she thought, whether they
thought her queer or not since they couldn't stop her.
She went, glancing at windows as she passed, looking for a place where
she could go to breakfast. She turned into the first restaurant that
offered, and after a hasty glance around it to be sure no one lurked
there that might betray her she subsided into the clatter with relief.
It was one more place to let time pass in, for it would be full two
hours before she could fulfil her errand. She stayed as long as she
dared, drinking two cups of the hideous coffee; stayed while many came
and went, until she felt the proprietor noticing her. That revived her
consciousness of the possible dangers still between her and the end she
held in view. She had heard of people being arrested for suspicious
conduct. She didn't feel sure in what this might consist, but surely
such an appearance could be avoided by walking fast and seeming to know
exactly where one was going.
It was ten o'clock in the morning, three hours since she had left her
house and a most reasonable time of daylight, when Flora turned out of
the flatness of "south of Market Street" and began to mount a
slow-rising hill. It was a wooden sidewalk she followed flanking a
wood-paved street, and these, with the wooden fences and dusty cypress
hedges and the houses peering over them upon her looked worn, battered
and belonging all to the past. None the less it bore traces of having
been a dignified past, and farther up on the crown of the hill among
deep-bosomed trees, two or three large mansions wore the gravely
triumphant aspect of having been brought successfully from a past empire
into a present with all their traditions and mahogany complete. Upward
toward these Flora was looking. Her breath was short from fast
climbing. Her cheeks under her thin veil were hot and bright.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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