“I—­She—­”

“Now mark my word, if it wasn’t to spare her I’d have invited you out long ago.  Haven’t you got any pride?”

“I have.  I have,” she almost moaned, and could have crumpled up there and swooned her humiliation.

“You’re not a regular girl.  You’re a she-devil.  That’s what you are!  Trying to come between your mother and me.  Ain’t you ashamed?  What is it you want?”

“Louis—­I don’t—­”

“First you turn down a fine fellow like Leo Friedlander, so he don’t come to the house any more, and then you take out on us whatever is eating you, by trying to come between me and the finest woman that ever lived.  Shame!  Shame!”

“Louis!” she said, “Louis!” wringing her hands in a dry wash of agony, “can’t you understand?  She’d rather have me.  It makes her nervous trying to pretend to you that she’s not suffering when she is.  That’s all, Louis.  You see, she’s not ashamed to suffer before me.  Why, Louis—­that’s all!  Why should I want to come between you and her?  Isn’t she dearer to me than anything in the world, and haven’t you been the best friend to me a girl could have?  That’s all—­Louis.”

He was placated and a little sorry and did not insist further upon going into the room.

“Funny,” he said.  “Funny,” and, adjusting his spectacles, snapped open his newspaper for a lonely evening.

The one thing that perturbed Alma almost more than anything else, as the dreaded cravings grew, with each siege her mother becoming more brutish and more given to profanity, was where she obtained the soluble tablets.

The well-thumbed old doctor’s prescription she had purloined even back in the hotel days, and embargo and legislation were daily making more and more furtive and prohibitive the traffic in drugs.

Once Alma, mistakenly, too, she thought later, had suspected a chauffeur of collusion with her mother and abruptly dismissed him, to Louis’ rage.

“What’s the idea?” he said, out of Carrie’s hearing, of course.  “Who’s running this shebang, anyway?”

Again, after Alma had guarded her well for days, scarcely leaving her side, Carrie laughed sardonically up into her daughter’s face, her eyes as glassy and without swimming fluid as a doll’s.

“I get it!  But wouldn’t you like to know where?  Yah!” And to Alma’s horror slapped her quite roundly across the cheek so that for an hour the sting, the shape of the red print of fingers, lay on her face.

One night in what had become the horrible sanctity of that bedchamber—­But let this sum it up.  When Alma was nineteen years old a little colony of gray hairs was creeping in on each temple.

And then one day, after a long period of quiet, when Carrie had lavished her really great wealth of contrite love upon her daughter and husband, spending on Alma and loading her with gifts of jewelry and finery, somehow to express her grateful adoration of her, paying her husband the secret penance of twofold fidelity to his well-being and every whim, Alma, returning from a trip taken reluctantly and at her mother’s bidding down to the basement trunk room, found her gone, a modish black-lace hat and the sable coat missing from the closet.