“This is my friend Miss Ackley, Louise,” she said.  “Take her to the west room, and call down and have a supper tray sent to her.”  Then she said to Maria that she must be tired, and would prefer going at once to her room.  “I am tired myself,” said Miss Blair.  “Such persons as I do not move about the face of the earth with impunity.  There is a wear and tear of the soul and the body when the body is so small that it scarcely holds the soul.  You will have your supper sent up, and your breakfast in the morning.  At ten o’clock I will send Adelaide to bring you to my room.”  She bade Maria good-night, and the girl followed the maid, stepping into an elevator on one side of the vestibule.  She had a vision of Miss Blair’s tiny figure with Adelaide moving slowly upward on the other side.

Maria reflected that she was glad that she had her toilet articles and her night-dress at least in her satchel.  She felt the maid looking at her, although her manner was very much like Adelaide’s.  She wondered what she would have thought if she had not at least had her simple necessaries for the night when she followed her into a room which seemed to her fairly wonderful.  It was a white room.  The walls were hung with paper covered with sheafs of white lilies; white fur rugs—­wolf-skins and skins of polar bears—­were strewn over the polished white floor.  All the toilet articles were ivory and the furniture white, with decorations of white lilies and silver.  In one corner stood a bed of silver with white draperies.  Beyond, Maria had a glimpse of a bath in white and silver, and a tiny dressing-room which looked like frost-work.  When the maid left her for a moment Maria stood and gazed breathless.  She realized a sort of delight in externals which she had never had before.  The externals seemed to be farther-reaching.  There was something about this white, virgin room which made it seem to her after her terror on the train like heaven.  A sense of absolute safety possessed her.  It was something to have that, although she was doing something so tremendous to her self-consciousness that she felt like a criminal, and the ache in her heart for those whom she had left never ceased.  The maid brought in a tray covered with dainty dishes of white and silver and a little flask of white wine.  Then, after Maria had refused further assistance, she left her.  Maria ate her supper.  She was in reality half famished.  Then she went to bed.  Nestling in her white bed, looking out of a lace-curtained window opposite through which came the glimpse of a long line of city lights, Maria felt more than ever as if she were in another world.  She felt as if she were gazing at her past, at even her loves of life, through the wrong end of a telescope.