It was early afternoon, sunlit and pleasantly cold.

The first rush of panic and the impulse to dash after stayed, she forced herself down into a chair, striving with the utmost difficulty for coherence of procedure.

Where in the half hour of her absence had her mother gone?  Matinee?  Impossible!  Walking?  Hardly possible.  Upon inquiry in the kitchen, neither of the maids had seen nor heard her depart.  Motoring?  With a hand that trembled in spite of itself Alma telephoned the garage.  Car and chauffeur were there.  Incredible as it seemed, Alma, upon more than one occasion, had lately been obliged to remind her mother that she was becoming careless of the old pointedly rosy hands.  Manicurist?  She telephoned the Bon Ton Beauty Parlors.  No.  Where?  O God!  Where?  Which way to begin?  That was what troubled her most.  To start right so as not to lose a precious second.

Suddenly, and for no particular reason, Alma began a hurried search through her mother’s dresser drawers of lovely personal appointments.  Turning over whole mounds of fresh white gloves, delving into nests of sheer handkerchiefs and stacks of webby lingerie.  Then for a while she stood quite helplessly, looking into the mirror, her hands closed about her throat.

“Please, God, where?”

A one-inch square of newspaper clipping, apparently gouged from the sheet with a hairpin, caught her eye from the top of one of the gold-backed hairbrushes.  Dawningly, Alma read.

It described in brief detail the innovation of a newly equipped narcotic clinic on the Bowery below Canal Street, provided to medically administer to the pathological cravings of addicts.

Fifteen minutes later Alma emerged from the Subway at Canal Street, and, with three blocks toward her destination ahead, started to run.

At the end of the first block she saw her mother, in the sable coat and the black-lace hat, coming toward her.

Her first impulse was to run faster and yoo-hoo, but she thought better of it and, by biting her lips and digging her finger nails, was able to slow down to a casual walk.

Carrie’s fur coat was flaring open and, because of the quality of her attire down there where the bilge waters of the city tide flow and eddy, stares followed her.

Once, to the stoppage of Alma’s heart, she saw Carrie halt and say a brief word to a truckman as he crossed the sidewalk with a bill of lading.  He hesitated, laughed, and went on.

Then she quickened her pace and went on, but as if with a sense of being followed, because constantly as she walked she jerked a step, to look back, and then again, over her shoulder.

A second time she stopped, this time to address a little nub of a woman without a hat and lugging one-sidedly a stack of men’s basted waistcoats, evidently for home work in some tenement.  She looked and muttered her un-understanding at whatever Carrie had to say, and shambled on.