But to-day, one in the multitude that moved, heavy of foot and weary of heart, through the great shop-lit thoroughfares, she felt in a peculiarly vulnerable moment. She had been walking for hours in the effort to tire her brain, afraid to seek out Massingale for fear that another deception was awaiting her, beginning more and more to doubt that anything but empty dreams would ever come. This physical weariness into which she had forced herself had brought a profound moral lassitude. She felt perilously near the point of surrender. At times she had a desire to take train and escape to somewhere unknown, to reconstruct everything from the bottom up. Ida's marriage, the departure of Winona, affected her in different ways. What better chance had she to struggle against the crushing weight of an implacable city? After all, was not Ida right? Did she really belong? How long could she endure in this rarefied air? At bottom, what did all these men really think of her--even Massingale? Did one of them consider her in equality? Never had she felt the bruising brutality of New York so much as she did this evening, wandering aimlessly from shop to shop. What was the use of struggling against these enormous forces, that could reckon all emotions, joy or sorrow, love or despair, only in tens of thousands? What difference, after all, did it really make what became of her in this huge maelstrom of New York? Who would notice, and who would remember for more than a few hours, what came to one girl in the hundreds of thousands? In her pocket was the money Winona had sent, from which her fingers had retreated in horror. Yet now no such sensation came to her. She was very tired, weary of the struggle, of being on foot, of defeat, of the contamination of poverty, of resisting temptation which could be so easily squared with her conscience. There was one particular shop-window past which she had gone a dozen times--a window in which was a dress she coveted, all gold and black, the color men preferred on her, a dress she could have so easily for the mere acceptance of the offer about which her fingers clung. And, after all, it was but money returned, not a gift. She was hovering before the fatal window for the tenth time, cold with the approach of darkness and the lack of the furs which had had to be surrendered, when suddenly Sassoon appeared at her side from some current of the crowd. She felt him at her shoulder, silently studying her, striving to seize her secret thought, and she started as if he were an apparition of the devil himself. "How long have you been here?" she asked hastily. "Four minutes--five," he said, shaking hands elaborately. "Well, what do you want?" "Everything in the window!" she replied angrily. "May I send them to you?" This made her angrier still. She shrugged her shoulders and glanced at her watch. "Take me to tea somewhere!" "A little run in the country?" "I don't care!"