She was far from understanding these feelings, but she did understand that she felt suddenly sickish and quite faint; and she thought practically of mamma’s little flask of brandy in her bag somewhere, if only she could find it.  Then speculations on this point vanished with the recollection that she stood in the modern Arabian Nights, all the resources of the world at her beck.

Cally stepped to the telephone and called down in a small but authoritative voice: 

“Send me up a cocktail at once, please.  Room 1704.”

“Yes, mum,” replied the experienced voice far below.  “What kind would you wish?”

“Oh ... the best,” said she, less authoritatively; and then, rang off hurriedly, thinking how funny it was that she couldn’t produce the name of a cocktail when needed, since papa shook one up for himself nearly every evening, and Hugo always ordered them when they dined together, and laughed at the little faces she made....

The cocktail came, on rubber heels, and she sipped it, walking about the room and not thinking at all about dressing.  A spoonful or so of the yellow concoction, and the sickish feeling vanished, and she felt instead rather devilish and fast, like the blondined villainess in a play.  She was a daring woman of the new school, a Woman with a Past, who rang up hotel bars and ordered the best cocktails sent up at once....

Possibly the cocktail had this moral reaction, that she no longer sought to discipline her mind.  She sipped the drink gingerly, and her thought fluttered backward and forward, full of contradictions and repetitions, as thought is in life, but now free....  Suppose, after all, that her past was not escaped?  It wasn’t such an easy thing to do, it seemed.  Dalhousie thought he had escaped his, but it had run him down at last, way off in Texas.  Suppose Dr. Vivian now decided (in view of her being a fugitive) that it was his duty to lay the matter before Colonel Dalhousie, and the tempestuous Colonel took the next train....

There was a knock at the door, causing her to start violently, and spill some of the cocktail.  However, it was not Colonel Dalhousie, but only the maid Flora, who entered with that air of eager hurry so characteristic of an habitually tardy race.  It appeared that the infernal powers had conspired against her promptitude in the shape of a blockade, not to mention losting her way through the malicious misdirection of a white man selling little men that danced on a string....

Having learned further that the postal uncle was poly las’ month but tollable now, Flora’s young mistress said: 

“We must dress in a hurry now, Flora.  It’s quarter to seven.”

And then she went on through to the sitting-room of the suite, to wake her mother, thinking:  “I can’t go on this way the rest of my life, jumping out of my skin every time there’s a knock....  What on earth have I been so afraid of?...”