She ended by choosing a dress with a hole in its sleeve. The last time she had worn it she had stood before a restaurant which was too luxurious, too ostentatious, which she was frightened to enter, but instead of saying: "I am afraid to enter here," she had been able to say: "I can't enter here with a hole in my sleeve."

She selected her cape which seemed more protective, more enveloping.

Also the cape held within its folds something of what she imagined was a quality possessed exclusively by man: some dash, some audacity, some swagger of freedom denied to woman.

The toreador's provocative flings, the medieval horsemen's floating flag of attack, a sail unfurled in full collision with the wind, the warrior's shield for his face in battle, all these she experienced when she placed a cape around her shoulder.

A spread-out cape was the bed of nomads, a cape unfurled was the flag of adventure.

Now she was dressed in a costume most appropriate to flights, battles, tournaments.

The curtain of the night's defenselessness was rising to expose a personage prepared.

Prepared, said the mirror, prepared said the shoes, prepared said the cape.

She stood contemplating herself arrayed for no peaceful or trusting encounter with life.

She was not surprised when she looked out of her window and saw the man who had been following her standing at the corner pretending to be reading a newspaper.

It was not a surprise because it was a materialization of a feeling she had known for many years: that of an Eye watching and following her throughout her life.

She walked along 18th St. towards the river. She walked slightly out of rhythm, like someone not breathing deeply, long steps and inclined forward as if racing.

It was a street completely lined with truck garages. At this hour they were sliding open the heavy iron doors and huge trucks were rolling out, obscuring the sun. Their wheels were as tall as Sabina.

They lined up so close together that she could no longer see the street or the houses across the way. On her right they made a wall of throbbing motors, and giant wheels starting to turn. On her left more doors were opening, more trucks advanced slowly as if to engulf her. They loomed threateningly, inhuman, so high she could not see the drivers.

Sabina felt a shrinking of her whole body, and as she shrank from the noise the trucks seemed to enlarge in her eyes, their scale becoming monstrous, the rolling of their wheels uncontrollable. She felt as a child in an enormous world of menacing giants. She felt her bones fragile in her sandals. She felt brittle and crushable. She felt overwhelmed by danger, by a mechanized evil.