One impulse alone directed her: to find her clothes; to put them on; to return, as far as the mask of appearances would take her, to the self that she had been. In spite of aching head and quivering hands, she wrapped the sheet about her and, with infinite care, got from the bed. The floor seemed to sweep up to meet her, but she steadied herself against the wall and, each timid stride a separate agony, began to stumble about the room. She looked for a clothes-closet or wardrobe, but there was neither. The only door was the door of exit, and the nearest chair was empty. In a corner she saw a pile of linen: laboriously she stooped and picked it up, unrolled a portion, and then, gasping in horror, tossed it away. On the other chair there lay a long kimona of crimson. She lifted it and found, neatly arranged below, a sheer cambric garment edged with coarse lace, two black silk stockings slashed with red, and a pair of slippers, high-heeled, with buckles of brass--for no reason that she could have formulated, the sight sickened her. She went to the bureau and tugged at its drawers, but all that she found was a single brown bottle, like that she had first observed on the washstand, filled with white tablets and labeled "Poison." Obviously, her clothes had been taken from the room. In a panic of shame, she groped blindly for the door: she must call for Mrs. Légère. She grasped the knob and turned it--the door was locked. Fear, mad and unreasoning, drove its spurs into her sides. Forgetting her nausea, heedless of her pain, she ran first to one window and then to the other, but the bowed shutters, though they admitted the light, would open for nothing beside: they were fastened with riveted loops of brass, and, looking through the small space between them, she could catch only a glimpse of the street far below. She tried to argue that the key might have fallen from the lock within the room, but she could not find it, and, the sheet dropping from her shoulders, she began to rattle at the knob, and then to pound upon the panels, her voice rising swiftly from a low call to a high, hysterical, frantic cry for help. "Mrs. Légère! Mrs. Légère! Mrs. Légère!" she cried, and then as suddenly ceased, tilted against the door, and collapsed into a naked heap upon the floor. All power of movement seemed to have slipped from her, but when there came a heavy footfall on the stair, a swish of skirts outside and the loud rasping of a key inserted in the lock, Mary leaped galvanically to her feet, gathered the sheet about her body, and flung herself upon the bed. The door opened and closed behind Rose Légère, who promptly relocked it and slipped the key into the swelling bosom but half concealed by her dragon-spotted, baby-blue negligé. "What in hell's the matter with _you_?" she demanded.