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Though the entire hotel was watching her Hannah was actually unconscious of Clint Darrow’s attentions, or their markedness, until her son-in-law Ed teased her about him one day. “Some gal!” said Ed, and roared with laughter. She resented this indignantly; felt that they regarded her as senile. She looked upon Clint Darrow as a fat old thing, if she looked at him at all; but rather pathetic, too. Hence her kindliness toward him. Now she avoided him. Thus goaded he actually proposed marriage and repeated the items of the European trip, the pearls, and the unused house on Woodlawn Avenue. Hannah, feeling suddenly faint and white, refused him awkwardly. She was almost indignant. She did not speak of it, but the hotel, somehow, knew. Hyde Park knew. The thing leaked out.

“But why?” said Marcia, smiling–giggling, almost. “Why? I think it would have been wonderful for you, Mother!”

Hannah suddenly felt that she need not degrade herself to explain why–she who had once triumphed over her own ordeal of marriage.

Marcia herself was planning a new career. The children were seven and nine–very nearly eight and ten. Marcia said she wanted a chance at self-expression. She announced a course in landscape gardening–“landscape architecture” was the new term.

“Chicago’s full of people who are moving to the suburbs and buying big places out north. They don’t know a thing about gardens. They don’t know a shrub from a tree when they see it. It’s a new field for women–in the country, at least–and I’m dying to try it. That youngest Fraser girl makes heaps, and I never thought much of her intelligence. Of course, after I finish and am ready to take commissions, I’ll have to be content with small jobs, at first. But later I may get a chance at grounds around public libraries and hospitals and railway stations. And if I can get one really big job at one of those new-rich north shore places I’ll be made.”

The course required two years and was rather expensive. But Marcia said it would pay, in the end. Besides, now that the war had knocked Ed’s business into a cocked hat for the next five years or more, the extra money would come in very handy for the children and herself and the household.

Hannah thought the whole plan nonsense. “I can’t see that you’re pinched, exactly. You may have to think a minute before you buy fresh strawberries for a meringue in February. But you do buy them.” She was remembering her own lean days, when February strawberries would have been as unattainable as though she had dwelt on a desert island.

On the day of the mirror accident in Peacock Alley, Hannah was meeting Marcia downtown for the purpose of helping her select spring outfits for the children. Later, Marcia explained, there would be no time. Her class met every morning except Saturday. Hannah tried to deny the little pang of terror at the prospect of new responsibility that this latest move of Marcia’s seemed about to thrust upon her. Marcia wasn’t covering her own job, she told herself. Why take another! She had given up an afternoon with Sarah because of this need of Marcia’s to-day. Marcia depended upon her mother’s shopping judgment more than she admitted. Thinking thus, and conscious of her tardiness (she had napped for ten minutes after lunch) Hannah Winter had met, face to face, with a crash, this strange, strained, rather haggard elderly woman in the mirror.

It was, then, ten minutes later than 2.07 when she finally came up to Marcia waiting, lips compressed, at the Michigan Avenue entrance, as planned.

“I bumped into that mirror—-“

“Oh, Mom! I’m sorry. Are you hurt? How in the world?… Such a morning … wash day … children their lunch … marketing … wall paper … Fifty-third Street … two o’clock …”

Suddenly, “Yes, I know,” said Hannah Winter, tartly. “I had to do all those things and more, forty years ago.”