into the room.

"Funny," he said. "Funny," and, adjusting his spectacles, snapped open
his newspaper for a lonely evening.

The one thing that perturbed Alma almost more than anything else, as the
dreaded cravings grew, with each siege her mother becoming more brutish
and more given to profanity, was where she obtained the soluble tablets.

The well-thumbed old doctor's prescription she had purloined even back
in the hotel days, and embargo and legislation were daily making more
and more furtive and prohibitive the traffic in drugs.

Once Alma, mistakenly, too, she thought later, had suspected a chauffeur
of collusion with her mother and abruptly dismissed him, to Louis' rage.

"What's the idea?" he said, out of Carrie's hearing, of course. "Who's
running this shebang, anyway?"

Again, after Alma had guarded her well for days, scarcely leaving her
side, Carrie laughed sardonically up into her daughter's face, her eyes
as glassy and without swimming fluid as a doll's.

"I get it! But wouldn't you like to know where? Yah!" And to Alma's
horror slapped her quite roundly across the cheek so that for an hour
the sting, the shape of the red print of fingers, lay on her face.

One night in what had become the horrible sanctity of that
bedchamber--But let this sum it up. When Alma was nineteen years old a
little colony of gray hairs was creeping in on each temple.