lamp was overturned. But toward morning, when Carrie lay exhausted, but
at rest in her daughter's arms, she kept muttering in her sleep:

"Thank you, baby. You saved me. Never leave me, Alma.
Never--never--never. You saved me, Alma."

And then the miracle of those next months. The return to New York. The
happily busy weeks of furnishing and the unlimited gratifications of the
well-filled purse. The selection of the limousine with the special body
that was fearfully and wonderfully made in mulberry upholstery with
mother-of-pearl caparisons. The fourteen-room apartment on West End
Avenue with four baths, drawing-room of pink-brocaded walls, and
Carrie's Roman bathroom that was precisely as large as her old hotel
sitting room, with two full-length wall mirrors, a dressing table
canopied in white lace over white satin, and the marble bath itself, two
steps down and with rubber curtains that swished after.

There were evenings when Carrie, who loved the tyranny of things with
what must have been a survival within her of the bazaar instinct, would
fall asleep almost directly after dinner, her head back against her
husband's shoulder, roundly tired out after a day all cluttered up with
matching the blue upholstery of their bedroom with taffeta bed hangings.
Shopping for a strip of pantry linoleum that was just the desired slate
color. Calculating with electricians over the plugs for floor lamps.
Herself edging pantry shelves in cotton lace.

Latz liked her so, with her fragrantly coiffured head, scarcely gray,
back against his shoulder, and with his newspapers, Wall Street journals
and the comic weeklies which he liked to read, would sit an entire
evening thus, moving only when his joints rebelled, his pipe smoke