The meeting with Florrie appeared to her, as she walked home that afternoon, to be the last touch needed to push her into a state of utter despondency.  The oppressive languor of the day had exhausted her strength, and when she left Dinard’s she felt too indifferent, too spiritless even for the drive in the Park.  It was still light when she got out of the stage at Twenty-third Street, and while she strolled listlessly down the blocks on the West Side, she had again that curious sensation of smothering which had come to her after her talk with O’Hara.

At the corner of Sixth Avenue a young Italian, with the face of a poet, was roasting peanuts in a little kerosene stove beside a flickering torch which enkindled the romantic youth in his eyes.  Farther away some ragged children were dancing to the music of a hand-organ, which ground out a melancholy waltz; and from a tiny flower stall behind the stand of a bootblack there drifted the intense sweetness of hyacinths.  An old negro, carrying a basket of clothes, passed her in the middle of the block, and she thought:  “That might have been in Richmond—­that and the hand-organ and the perfume of hyacinths.”  A vision of Hill Street floated before her—­the long straight street, with the sudden drop of ragged hill at the end; the old houses, with crumbling porches and countless signs:  “Boarders Wanted” in the windows between the patched curtains; the irregular rows of tulip poplar, elm, or sycamore trees throwing their crooked shadows over the cobblestones; the blades of grass sprouting along the edges of the brick pavement—­the vision of Hill Street as she remembered it twenty years ago in her girlhood; and then the image of her mother’s face gazing out beneath the creamy blossoms and the dark shining leaves of the old magnolia tree.  “Everything must have changed, I’d hardly recognize it,” she thought.  “Nobody we know lives on that side now, mother says.  Yes, it has been a long time.”  She sighed, and then a little laugh broke from her lips, as she remembered that Charley, who had recently been West on a business trip, had brought home the good news that Richmond was as progressive as Denver.  “At least it seems so to Charley,” Mrs. Carr had hastened to add, “but you know how proud Charley is of all our newness.  He says there is not a street in the West that looks fresher or more beautiful than Monument Avenue, and I am sure that is a great comfort.  Cousin Jimmy says it shows what the South can do when it tries.”

“I’d like to go back,” mused Gabriella, walking more and more slowly.  “I haven’t been home for eighteen years, and I am thirty-eight to-day.”  With the fugitive sweetness of the hyacinths there rushed over her again the feeling that life was slipping, slipping, and that she was missing something infinitely precious, something infinitely desirable.  It was the panic of fleeting youth, of youth unsatisfied, denied, and still insatiable.