late, and there was a parade that morning. It added to the strangeness of everything that she had to go alone to the Pelham and there engage a room and bath. And when she was inside it, the door locked, to the sensation of strangeness was added one of dismay. The bleakness of the room, the two beds side by side, the frankness of the bathroom opening off it, shocked and revolted her. She was a wife, she told herself fiercely, not a mistress, but the sensation remained. The very bareness of the place, its reduction of life to its physical necessities added to it.
Never before had she occupied a hotel room in all its starkness. A trunkful of silk pillows, a bright slumber robe on a couch, little vases for flowers and family pictures in silver frames had always before created a temporary atmosphere of home. She could see Nora now, moving about, deftly pulling the chairs and putting out the luxurious trifles with which they had always traveled.
She could not bear it. After all, the room was a shrine; it must be, or she was all wrong. Everything was wrong. She set feverishly to work, placing the gold fittings from her bag on the dressing table, ordering flowers from the floristshop below, even finally going down herself and, fearful of being recognized, buying an armful of magazines from the news stand. And as she worked, she lost that early panic. She had achieved, not a shrine perhaps, but a bit of home.
Actually she was working against time to think. It must come, she knew. She could not fight down forever the recognition of what she had done; the scandal and talk, the stricken household, Herbert. That must come, but not now. Not yet. She lived feverishly in the present; she could look neither back nor ahead.
At something before noon she heard the sirens of fire engines, and went to her window to look out. But she could not see them. She had, standing there in that room that was to be a shrine, no idea that that sound was to alter the whole course of her life and Tom McNair's. She listened to them and then went back to her roses, ignorant that they had set in motion a small chain of events that was to lead to catastrophe.
