In the subway, a little later, clinging to a dirty strap, with a blackened mechanic in the seat before her, a box of tools at her feet, and a garlic-scented charwoman jolting against her shoulder, she was overcome by a sudden cloud of despondency.  Her courage, her hopefulness, her philosophy, seemed to melt like frost in her thoughts, leaving behind only a sodden sense of loss, of emptiness, of defeat.  “I’ve had a mean life,” she said to herself resentfully.  “I’ve had a mean life.  What has ever happened to me that was worth while?  What have I ever had except hard work and disappointment?  I am thirty-seven years old.  My youth is going, and I have nothing to show for it but ten years of dressmaking.  The best of my life is over, and when I look back on it, it is only a blank.”  It was as if the interview with the great man she had just left had completed the desolating retrospect of a lifetime.  Was there nothing but disenchantment ahead of her?  Was life merely the dropping of illusion after illusion, the falling of petals at the first touch from a flower that is beginning to fade?  “Yes, nothing has ever happened to me that was worth while,” she repeated, forgetting her children for the moment.  Then, because the heavy air stifled her, she left the car and turned into West Twenty-third Street where the lights were coming out softly in the spring twilight.  Though it was too late to go over the house Fanny wanted, it occurred to her that she might look at the outside of it before she took the Harlem elevated train at one of the West Side stations.  The walk would do her good and perhaps blow away the disquieting recollections of her encounter with Judge Crowborough.  Not until her mood changed, she determined, would she go back to the children.

At the corner she bought a bunch of lilacs because a man held them out to her temptingly when she approached, and as she buried her face in the blossoms, she said resolutely:  “No, I haven’t had a mean life.  It can’t be mean unless I think it so, and I won’t—­I won’t.  After all, it isn’t the kind of life you have, but the way you think about it that matters.”

The air was deliciously mild; streaks of pale gold lingered above the grim outlines of the buildings; and the wild, sweet spirit of spring fluttered like an imprisoned creature in the gray streets of the city.  It was May again, and the pipes of Pan were fluting the ancient songs in the ancient racial fields of the memory.  There was a spring softness in the fleecy white of the clouds, in the flowing gold of the sunset, in the languorous kiss of the breeze, in the gentle rippling waves of the dust on the pavement.  For years she had been so tranquil, and now suddenly, at the flitting touch of the spirit of spring, she knew that youth was slipping, slipping, and that with youth, went romance, enchantment, adventure.  It was slipping from her, and she had never really held it.  She had had only the second-rate; she had missed the best always—­the best of