There was a new way of doing the hair which Win had noticed on a smiling wax beauty in Peter Rolls’s Window-World and had dimly wished to try for herself.  Only dimly, because if her hair were glossy and trim it suited those plain, ninety-eight-cent shirt waists better than the elaborate fashions affected by Lily Leavitt and one or two of the more successful tigresses who cheaply copied expensive customers.  Now there was an incentive for the experiment and Win laughed at the eagerness with which she looked forward to the moment of making it, laughed patronizingly, as she might have laughed at a child’s longing for Christmas.

“Anyhow, it’s something that I can laugh,” she thought, recalling, as she often did, her boast to Peter Rolls, Jr.  “And I haven’t cried yet!”

She had not guessed how vividly the sight of the Moon dress and putting it on would bring Mr. Balm of Gilead to her mind.  But as she stood gazing into the greenish glass, with her hair very successfully done in the new way and the Moon gown shimmering night-blue and silver, it was as if Peter Rolls came and looked over her shoulder, their eyes meeting in the mirror.

Yes, she saw him for an instant as clearly as that.  He was there.  He was her friend, the nicest, most altogether delightful man she had ever seen; the one she knew best and needed most, though their actual acquaintanceship was but a few days old.  The kind blue eyes were true and brave, and said:  “I dare you not to believe in me, as I believe in you!”

Then the vision (it had almost amounted to that) was gone like a broken bubble.  Win felt physically sick, as if the one thing worth having in the world had been shown her for a second, then suddenly snatched away forever.

The silvery sheen and the faint, lingering perfume of that Nadine model gown had woven a magic carpet of moonbeams and transported her back to the mirrored room on the Monarchic for an instant.  But it was only for an instant.  Then the Columbus Avenue bedroom, with its window open to the roar and rush of the “L,” had her again, and made the Moon dress and the Moon-dress dreams seem ridiculously unsuited to life.

Win touched a switch which shut off light from the one unshaded electric bulb hanging like a lambent pear over her head.  Then, palm-leaf fan in hand, she sat down in the blue summer darkness to await the coming of Miss Leavitt.

For the first time she repented her promise to go out.  Monotony was preferable to the party as she pictured it—­a silly, giggling crowd of crude young people among whom she, the stranger, would be like a muted note on a cheap piano.  Should she stay at home, after all, and tell Lily that the heat had made her too limp to stir?  It would be quite true.  But no.  If she stayed she would not have the courage to undress for a long, long time.  She would just sit there in the dark by the window in the Moon gown, its perfume surrounding her with the past, shutting her up, as it were, in the mirror room with Mr. Balm of Gilead who had never really existed.