"Oh yes?" Alma did not want to spend time over Harriett's apartment house, unless it was brightly described. It was too soon for bright descriptions. The item had been dragged in and wasted, out of place. A single distasteful fact. The servants, hidden away beyond the velvet staircase, seemed to be hearing the unsuitable disclosure. She sought about in her mind for something that would hold its own; one of the points of conflict that had cleared, since she was last here, to single unanswerable statements. But Alma forestalled her, attacking the silence with her gayest voice. "Oh Miriam, what _do_ you think. I saw a Speck; yesterday; on the Grand Esplanade. _Do_ you remember the Specks?" Miriam beamed and agreed, breathing in reminiscences. But they would be endless; and would not satisfy them, or bring them together. She could not, with Alma alone, pretend that those memories were merely amusing. It was a treachery. The mere mention of a name sent her back to the unbearable happiness of that last school summer, a sunlit flower-filled world opening before her, the feeling of being herself a flower, expanding in the sunlight. She could not regard it as a past. All that had happened since was a momentary straying aside, to be forgotten. To that other world she was still going forward. One day she would suddenly come upon it, as she did in her dreams. The flower-scented air of it was in her nostrils as she sat reluctantly rousing herself to take Alma's cue. "There were millions of them." It had never occurred to her that they were funny. Alma, even then, outside her set of grave romantic friendships, had seen almost everything as a comic spectacle and had no desire to go back. "Yes, _weren't_ they innumerable! And so _large_! It was a large one I saw. The very biggest Speck of all I think it must have been." "I expect it was Belinda." "Oh, my _dear_! _Could_ you tell them apart?" "Belinda was one of the middle ones. Absolutely _square_. I liked her for that and her deep bass voice and her silence." "Oh, but Miriam, such a _heavy_ silence." "That was _why_. Perhaps because she made me feel sylph like and elegant. Me, Susan.... Or it might have been _Mehetabel_; the eldest of the younger ones. I once heard her answer in class...." "My _dear_! Could a Speck really speak?" "Hetta did. In a boo; like the voice of the wind." She contemplated her thoughtless simile. It was exactly true. First a sound, breathy and resonant, and then words _blown_ on it.... Alma's amused laughter was tailing off into little snickers; repeated while she looked for something else. But the revived Specks marshalled themselves more and more clearly, playing their parts in the crowded scene. "And you know the eldest, Alathea, was quite willowy. Darker than the others. They were all mid-brown." "Oh Miriam; doesn't that express them?" "I wonder what they are all doing?" "Nothing, my dear. Oh _nothing_. Now _can_ you imagine a Speck doing anything whatever?"