But this mood, also, passed quickly, and a little later, while she rolled through the grey streets, into which the slant sunbeams could bring no colour, she surrendered again to that terror of the unknown which had seized her when she stood in the station. The beauty had departed from the buildings; the pavements were dirty; the little discoloured piles of snow made the crossings slippery and dangerous; and she held her breath as they passed through the crowded streets on the west side, overcome by the fear of "catching" some malign malady from the smells and the filth. The negro quarters in Dinwiddie were dirty enough, but not, she thought with a kind of triumph, quite so dirty as New York. When the cab turned into Fifth Avenue, she took her handkerchief from her nostrils; but this imposing street, which had not yet emerged from its evil dream of Victorian brownstone, impressed her chiefly as a place of a thousand prisons. It was impossible to believe that those frowning walls, undecorated by a creeper or the shadow of a tree, could really be homes where people lived and children were born. At first she had gazed with a childish interest and curiosity on the houses she was passing; then the sense of strangeness gave place presently to the exigent necessity of reaching Oliver as soon as possible. But the driver appeared indifferent to her timid taps on the glass at his back, while the horse progressed with the feeble activity of one who had spent a quarter of a century ineffectually making an effort. Her impatience, which she had at first kept under control, began to run in quivers of nervousness through her limbs. The very richness of her personal life, which had condensed all experience into a single emotional centre, and restricted her vision of the universe to that solitary window of the soul through which she looked, prevented her now from seeing in the city anything except the dreary background of Oliver's illness and failure. The naïve wonder with which she had watched the gigantic outlines shape themselves out of the white fog, had faded utterly from her mind. She ached with longing to reach Oliver and to find him well enough to take the first train back to Dinwiddie. At the hotel her bag and umbrella were wrested from her by an imperious uniformed attendant, and in what seemed to her an incredibly short space of time, she was following him along a velvet lined corridor on the tenth floor. The swift ascent in the elevator had made her dizzy, and the physical sensation reminded her that she was weak for food. Then the attendant rapped imperatively at a door just beyond a shining staircase, and she forgot herself as completely as it had been her habit to do since her marriage. "Come in!" responded a muffled voice on the inside, and as the door swung open, she saw Oliver, in his dressing-gown, and with an unshaved face, reading a newspaper beside a table on which stood an untasted cup of coffee.