"She used to talk to me about you. She said you must
be so clever and so handsome that no one could remember her. Sometimes
she cried and said she did not want any of you to see her again, because
she was only a hideous, little, thin, yellow old woman. When I was very
little she told me stories about New York and Fifth Avenue. I thought
they were not real places--I though they were places in fairyland."
Betty patted his shoulder and looked away for a moment when he said
this. In her remote and helpless loneliness, to Rosy's homesick,
yearning soul, noisy, rattling New York, Fifth Avenue with its traffic
and people, its brown-stone houses and ricketty stages, had seemed like
THAT--so splendid and bright and heart-filling, that she had painted
them in colours which could belong only to fairyland. It said so much.
The thing she had suspected as she had talked to her sister was, before
the interview ended, made curiously clear. The first obstacle in her
pathway would be the shrinking of a creature who had been so long under
dominion that the mere thought of seeing any steps taken towards her
rescue filled her with alarm. One might be prepared for her almost
praying to be let alone, because she felt that the process of her
salvation would bring about such shocks and torments as she could not
endure the facing of.
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