Though she spoke sharply, the sharpness was directed not to Miss Polly, but to herself—­to her own incomprehensible childishness.  The man interested her; already she had thought of him daily since she first came to the house; already she had begun to wonder about him, and she realized that she should wonder still more because of what Miss Polly had told her.  When he had approached her in the yard, she had been vaguely disturbed, vaguely thrilled by the strangeness and the mystery surrounding him; she had been subtly aware of his nearness before she heard his step, and turning, found his eyes fixed upon her.  Her own weakness in not controlling her curiosity, in recurring, in spite of her determined resolve to that first meeting, in allowing a coarse, rough stranger—­yes, a coarse, rough, uneducated stranger, she insisted desperately—­to hold her attention for a minute—­the incredible weakness of these things goaded her into a feeling of positive anger.  For ten years there had been no men in her life, and now at thirty-seven, when she was almost middle-aged, she was beginning to feel curious about the history of the first good-looking man she encountered—­about a mere robust, boisterous embodiment of masculinity.  “What difference can it make to me who Alice is?” she demanded indignantly.  “What possible difference?” She forced herself to think tenderly of Arthur; but during the last few months the image of Arthur had receded an immeasurable distance from her life.  His remoteness and his unreality distressed her; but try as she would, she could not recall him from the gauzy fabric of dreams to the tangible substance of flesh.

“It isn’t that I care for myself,” she said to Miss Polly abruptly, as if she were defending herself against an unspoken accusation.  “I am a working woman, and a working woman can’t afford to be snobbish—­certainly a dressmaker can’t—­but I must look after my children.  That is an imperative duty.  I must see that they form friendships in their own class.”

But life, as she had already discovered, has a sardonic manner of its own in such crises.  That night she planned carefully, lying awake in the darkness, the subterfuges and excuses by which she would keep Archibald away from O’Hara, and the very next afternoon when she came home from work she found confusion in the street, a fire engine at the corner, and, on the steps of her home, the boy clinging rapturously to the hand of the man.

“You ought to have been here, mother,” cried Archibald in tones of ecstatic excitement.  “We had a fire down the street in that apartment house—­and before the firemen came Mr. O’Hara went in and got out a woman and some children who had been overcome by smoke.  He had to lower them from a fire-escape, and he got every one of them out before the engine could get here.  I saw it all.  I was on the corner and saw it all.

“I hope Mr. O’Hara wasn’t hurt,” remarked Gabriella, but her voice was not enthusiastic.