Yet, had he not?  What had the eyes in the cracked glass said just now?  Why shouldn’t she believe them instead of Ena Rolls’s dreadful hints?  Why might not a sister, even with the best intentions, be mistaken about a brother?

These were exactly the sort of questions that were upsetting and altogether useless to ask one’s self, and Win jumped up to turn on the electric light again.  She would go with Lily Leavitt!

Five minutes later a taxicab—­a real, live, magnificent, unthinkably expensive taxicab—­stopped and chortled in front of the apartment house in which Mrs. McFarrell’s flat was one of many.  Heads flew out of windows, for the thing was unbelievable, and among other heads was Win’s.

Instinct cried that the chortling was for her.  The balcony where the rubber plants had died and mummied themselves, being scarcely more than a foot wide, she was able to see a face, crowned with red hair and white as a Pierrette’s in the lights of the street, looking anxiously up from the cab window.  Its expression implored the guest to hurry down, because each heart-throb meant not a drop of red blood, but several red cents.  Win caught the message, and seizing the ancient though still respectable evening cloak which had spent months in a trunk with the “New Moon,” she flew downstairs.

“What an extravagant creature!” she gasped, breathless when after a wasted sixty seconds at most the taxi was en route.

“I had a present from a gentleman friend,” said Lily in a self-satisfied voice, adding hastily, in deference to Miss Child’s “stuck-up primness,” “a filopena present, to choose myself anything I liked with.  I thought us bein’ in party dress, and you sort o’ tired out, a taxi’d be just about the best thing goin’.”

This reduced Win to the necessity for gratitude, and after months of the “L,” the subway, and the crosstown car, the girl could not help revelling in a taxi.  She refused to be depressed by the gloomy spectacle of lower-class New York in the throes of a heat wave—­pallid people hanging out of windows or standing at corners to be eased of their torture by the merciful spray from fire hydrants; barefooted half-naked children staring thirstily at soda fountains in bright, hot drug stores they could never hope to enter—­every one limp, lethargic, glistening unhealthily with horrid moisture, all loathing themselves and indifferent to each other.  Sometimes Win felt that these were her true brothers and sisters, the only ones who could understand, because they were the only ones who really suffered; but to-night she dared not think of them.  If she did, because of what they endured she could not enjoy the ice-cream and strawberries in the snow coolness of the artist’s borrowed house.

New York not being her own city, its different divisions lacked for her the meaning and importance they had for those at home; therefore she was disappointingly calm when Lily made the taxi stop in front of a house only three or four doors off Fifth Avenue.  Miss Leavitt had the fare ready, with a small tip for the driver, and the two were out of the cab, standing in the street, before Win noticed a thing that struck her sharply and quickly as being very strange.