"What are you going to do?" I demanded, as I saw her white-clad figure writhe itself into a street dress. There was something primordial and Adamitic in the very calmness with which she swept through the flimsy reservations of sex. She was as unconscious of my predicament as a cave woman might have been. And the next moment she was crushing lingerie and narrow-toed shoes and toilet articles and undecipherable garments of folded silk into an English club-bag. Then she turned to glance at her watch on the dresser. "I'm going!" she said at last, as she caught up a second hand-bag of alligator skin and crammed into it jewel boxes of dark plush and cases of different colored kid, and still more clothing and lingerie. "I'm going to catch the _Nieuw Amsterdam_." "For where?" "For Europe!" Her quick and dextrous hands had pinned on a hat and veil as I stood in wonder watching her. "Call a taxi, please," she said, as she struggled into her coat. "And a boy for my bags." I was still at the receiver when she came into the room and looked down for a moment at the woman moaning and whimpering on the coffee-stained floor. Then she began resolutely and calmly drawing on her gloves. "Couldn't we do something for them?" I said as I stepped back into the bedroom for her hand-bag. "What?" she demanded, as she leaned over the bed where Whelan's reviving body twitched and moved. "There must be something." "There's nothing. Oh, believe me, you can't help him. I can't help him. He's got his own way to go. And it's a terribly short way!" She flung open a bureau drawer and crammed a further article or two down in her still open chatelaine bag. Then she opened the outer door for the boy who had come for the bags. Then she looked at her watch again. "You must not come back," she said to me. "They may be here any time." "Who may?" I asked. "The police," she answered as she closed the door. She did not speak again until we were at the side of the taxicab. "To the Holland American Wharf," she said. Nor did she speak all the while we purred and hummed and dodged our way across the city. She did not move until we jolted aboard the ferry-boat, and the clanging of the landing-float's pawl-and-rachet told us we were no longer on that shrill and narrow island where the fever of life burns to the edge of its three laving rivers. It was then and only then that I noticed the convulsive shaking of her shoulders. "What is it?" I asked, helplessly, oppressed by the worlds that seemed to stand between us. "It's nothing," she said, with her teeth against her lip. But the next minute she was crying as forlornly and openly as a child. "What is it?" I repeated, as inadequately as before, knowing the uselessness of any debilitating touch of sympathy. "It's so hard," she said, struggling to control her voice. "What is?" "It's so hard to begin over." "But they say you're the cleverest woman in the world!" was the only consolation I could offer her.