"There wasn't any good reason. I came because I was awfully lonely. There
isn't a soul that I can speak out to, except you. You don't know what that
means. I go about in the schoolroom, and up and down the streets, and see
things--horrible things. The world gets to be one big torture chamber, and
then I have to cry out. I come to you to cry out,--because you really care.
Now I can go away, and keep silent for a long time."

"You make too much of it," the dentist protested. He busied himself in
putting the little steel instruments into their purple plush beds and
locking the drawers.

"Yes, I make too much of it," Mrs. Preston acknowledged quietly, as she
opened the door. "Good night."

"I guess she loves him still and don't like to own it. Women are generally
so," the dentist commented, when he was left alone. He picked up a sheaf of
stock certificates and eyed them critically. "They're nicer than the Placer
Mining ones. They just look fit to eat."

He locked the certificates of stock in the new company into a tiny safe,
and prepared to pull down the shade. In the railroad yards below, the great
eyes of the locomotives glared though the March dusk. As the suburban
trains pulled out from minute to minute, thick wreaths of smoke shot up
above the white steam blasts of the surrounding buildings. The smoke and
steam were sucked together into the vortex of a cross street.

'I wished I hadn't let her go alone,' the dentist mused. 'Some day she'll
just go over there into the lake.'