She had lunched with Sassoon, De Joncy, Massingale. She was a part of all this--of the Brahmin caste; and her little body rocking to the swooping turns, deliciously cradled, her eyes half closed, her nostrils drawing in this frantic air as if it were the breath of an enchanting perfume, she let her imagination go: already there by right, married to Massingale or Lindaberry--she saw not which quite clearly. Nor did it matter. Only she herself mattered. "Riverside or park, Dodo?" "Through the park," she said; and roused from her castle-building, she laughed at herself with a tolerant amused confusion. "Good spirits, eh?" "So-so!" In the park there were fewer automobiles. She no longer had the feeling of the crowd pressing about her, claiming her for its own. There were no restaurants or climbing façades. There was the earth, bare, shivering, and the sky filled with the invader. She had a horror of change, and suffered with a profound and uncomprehended trouble when, each year, she saw summer go into the mystery of winter, and again when came the awakening miracle. Yesterday, when she had passed, the splendor of the trees, it is true, lay shorn upon the ground; but the earth was warm, pleasant, with a fragrant odor, the air soft and the evening descended in a glow. Now there was a difference. Over all was the dread sense of change. Each tree stood alone, aghast, against the sky, the ground bleak, bare, the leaves wandering with a little moaning, driven restlessness. Even against the gray banks piling up against the north there was something vacant and horribly endless. From tree, sky and empty earth a spirit had suddenly withdrawn, and all this change had come within an hour, in a twinkling--without warning. Now she could no longer put it from her, this resistless verity that laid its chill fingers across her heart. It was not of the change in nature she thought--no; but of that specter which some day, inexorably, would rise from a distant horizon, even as the wind in an hour goes round to the north and winter rushes in. She was twenty-two and she had a horror of this thief, who came soft-footed and unreal, to steal the meager years. She stiffened suddenly, clutching her stole to her throat. "Too cold?" "Yes!" "I've got a coat for you." "No; go back!" "Already?" "Yes!" "Tea?" "No! Go back!" She closed her eyes, not to see, but the thing was there, everywhere, in the air that came to her, in the sad tiny sounds that rose about them. Yes, she herself would change inexorably, as all things filled their appointed time. What she had was given but for a day--all her fragile armament was but for a day. Not much longer could she go blithely along the summery paths of summer. She thought of Winona Horning, who had played too long. She thought of thirty as a sort of sepulcher, an end of all things! She felt something new impelling her on--a haste and a warning.