arguments for her marriage presented themselves to her in the forms of cases of silver and of her wedding dress in its white satin box.  Mrs. Payne had spent the afternoon, she knew, in arranging this silver on covered tables in an empty room, and she could see plainly the old lady’s animated movements, the careful eye with which she estimated the value of each gift, and the expression of approval or contempt with which she grouped it according to its importance.  Then she thought of Kemper held to his love by the embarrassment of these presents, by the hopelessness of returning them, and by his conventional horror of “getting into print,” and at the picture the laugh grew almost hysterical on her lips.  How sordid it all was!  This array of silver, Mrs. Payne’s reproachful comic mask, and Kemper, pulling his moustache as he stood upon the hearthrug, all whirled confusedly in the dimly lighted street before her.  She felt her knees tremble, and while this weakness lasted it seemed to her that it would be better to go back and get warm again, and submit to anything they forced upon her.  Her flesh, in its weakness, would have yielded, but something more powerful than the flesh—­the soul within which she had so long rejected—­struggled on after the impulses of the body had surrendered.

The lights grew suddenly blurred before her eyes, and looking up, she found that she had reached a ferry, and that a crowd from a neighbouring factory was hurrying through the open doors into the boat which was about to put off.  For the first time it occurred to her that she might leave the city; and going inside she bought a ticket and followed the people who were rushing across the gangway.  Where it would take her she had no idea, but when after a few minutes the boat had crossed to the other side, she went out again with the crowd, and then turning in the direction where there appeared to be open country, she walked on more rapidly as if her thoughts flew straight ahead into the broader spaces of the horizon.

At first there were rows of streets, a few scattered shops in among the houses, and groups of workmen from the factories lounging upon the sidewalk.  A child, with a crooked back, in a red dress, ran across the pavement in front of her and stopped with an exclamation before a window which contained a display of pink and white candy.  Then a second child joined her, and the two fell to discussing the various highly coloured sweets arrayed on little fancy squares of paper behind the glass.  As Laura watched them, pausing breathlessly in her walk, every trivial detail of this incident seemed to her to possess an equal importance with all other happenings large or small:  for the events of her individual experience had so distorted her perceptions of the ascending values of life, that her own luckless pursuit of happiness appeared of no greater importance in her eyes than the child, with the crooked back, making her choice of sweets.  Her own emotions, indeed, interested her no longer, but she was aware of a dull curiosity concerning the crippled child.  Would her whole life become misshapen because of the physical form which she wore like an outer garment?  And she felt, at the thought, that she would like to stand upon the side of the child and upon the side of all who were oppressed and made miserable by the crookedness either of the body or of destiny.