Page:O Genteel Lady! (1926).pdf/19

 her with hideous vegetable eyes and patted their chests and thighs. She struggled to run. Little fiends were upon her, pinching and pulling. Her feet stuck. She had taken root. The earth, which had so recently borne this strange crop, was sinking beneath her.

Lanice knew she slept and wanted to wake. She moaned piteously. Papa watched her fall and did not help, but his red mouth moved sarcastically in the midst of his black silk beard. 'Augustus!' she cried, and desperately resented the look of superior virtue he cast towards his erstwhile fiancée. 'I am purer than thou art,' he said, 'as high as the Heavens are above the earth...'

She woke, half falling to the floor, her bronze slippers several feet away from the edge of her skirt. She was corpse-cold, but drenched with sweat. Her icicle fingers were pressed to her pounding heart.

'Where am I, where am I? Oh, dear Lord, save me!'

Struggling inside her hoopskirt she got to her feet, and stared about her. Only the dirty train and the cold people by the fire. She wanted to laugh, almost cried, and suddenly felt a return of the sickly sense of nausea. Then she sat down, ashamed of her display. A passenger, who an hour before could not have imagined that this doll even had legs, noticed with amazement and intense interest that she seemed to be a quadruped. The points of four feet protruded from under the pale skirt flounced with velvet.

It was only five o'clock, but the February day was