Mrs. Champney envisaged her life as divided into epochs, each one with its own significance and its own memories. There was her childhood, there was her girlhood. There were the early days of her married life, when she and her husband had been alone. There were the crowded and anxious and wonderful years when her children had been little. There was the beginning of her widowhood, overshadowed with anguish and loneliness, yet with a dark beauty of its own. There was her tranquil middle age, and there was her business life. She had begun it on Tuesday, and this was Friday. It had lasted four days, yet it seemed to her quite as long as all the years of her youth. It seemed a lifetime in itself, in which she had acquired a new and bitter wisdom. The train stopped at her station, and, with a crowd of other home-going commuters, Mrs. Champney got out and hurried up the steps to the street, to catch a trolley car; but she was not quick enough. By the time she got there the car was full, and she drew back and let it go. She never was quick enough any more. She seemed to have been transferred into a world of terrific speed and vigor, where she was hopelessly outdistanced, hopelessly old and weary and slow. She had thought, until this week, that she was a fairly intelligent and energetic woman. She had even had her innocent little vanities; but now, standing on the corner and looking after the car— “I’m a silly, doddering old thing!” she said to herself, with a trembling lip. She remembered all the dreadful defeats and humiliations of the week. She remembered how slow she had been about wrapping up things and making change—how curt she had been with some of the wealthiest and most important customers—how stupid she had been about understanding the Polish and Italian women who brought in their work. She remembered the weary patience of Miss Elliott, who managed the shop. Miss Elliott was not more than twenty-eight, but she had been to Mrs. Champney like a discouraged but long-suffering teacher with a very trying child. “Doddering!” Mrs. Champney repeated. She was alone on the corner. In this new world nobody waited for anything. Those who, like herself, had missed the car, had at once set off on foot; and Mrs. Champney decided to do so herself. It was less than a mile—a pleasant walk in the soft April dusk. This walk might have been specially designed by Miss Elliott to teach Mrs. Champney another lesson; only it was a lesson that she had already learned. She really needed no further demonstration of the fact that she was fifty and utterly tired and miserable. It was superfluous, it was cruel, and it made her angry. When she reached the street where Robert’s little house stood, her heart was hot and bitter with resentment. “If they’d only let me alone!” she thought. “I don’t want any one to speak to me or look at me. I know I’m unreasonable. I want to be unreasonable. I want to be let alone!”