The next day Judith returned to the city. Winter had arrived in earnest and there were other reasons why Braeburn had become impossible. She drove to the station in a storm of blinding sleet, while the wind, howling through trees suddenly become gaunt, seemed to shriek and gibber with derision at her going. But the city house had its memories, too. Recollections clustered everywhere, mocking her. She made up her mind impulsively that she would go to Florida. It was out of season of course, but it would be the more restful for that. She felt very tired. She even consulted time tables. But one afternoon, when she was in her motor, she saw Imrie. She followed him with her eyes until he disappeared. She had not seen him for months, though she knew in a vague sort of way, what he was doing. He was perfectly justified, of course, in neglecting her. She had surely done nothing to encourage his attentions. In fact she had done not a little to discourage them completely. Nevertheless his indifference piqued her. She decided not to go to Florida,--at least not until January. The real reason for the postponement, she managed to convince herself, was her talk with Mrs. Dodson. It occurred at a little dinner party given by Mrs. Weidely, a lady of the most unimpeachable conventionality, who satisfied an unsuspected craving of her nature by gathering about her the most thoroughly unconventional people she could find. Had her husband, now deceased, not been the upright president of a very large bank, and were her house not, in consequence, situated in a location of indisputable respectability, these dynamic assemblies would have been held with the attentive co-operation of the police, a condition with which some of her guests as a matter of fact were not at all unfamiliar. Mrs. Dodson, who went out very little, was present chiefly because Mrs. Weidely was a friend of long standing, whose almost tearful assurance that her absence would ruin the evening, had been too touching for resistance. Mrs. Dodson was a kind-hearted, if not particularly credulous, woman. When Judith arrived, having been invited, she suspected, chiefly to give "balance" to the affair, a young man with a narrow, equine face and a great deal of coarse black hair, who she afterwards learned was named Klemm, was standing in front of the fireplace, his legs wide apart, and talking very rapidly, in a high, thin voice, punctuating his sentences with rapier-like movements of his long, sharp fingers.