“Oh,” said May, with a wave of her hands, “those things take care of themselves. I really can’t be bothered with money. Fate decides.”

“I’ve never had so much,” Annie said, “all at one time.”

“I used to live like a queen!” May cried, dropping the books on the floor. “I had thirty-two pairs of shoes, Balmain dresses. How unimportant it all is! All I need is a piano, a little fragment of nature, a bird, a plant…we must rid ourselves of the passion for material things. Freedom! I shall never cease to regret that you did not meet the swami…heavenly man…”

“We are leaving in the morning?”

“I have worked it out on the chart. Ten o’clock is auspicious. You will forgive me for not coming to pick you up? But I must leave from here.”

Annie agreed to be at May’s by 9:30 for coffee—“so we won’t have to stop for a few hours until we escape the aura of this city. It extends farther than most people suspect!”

She went back to Seventy-third Street, where she met Samuel on his way out. He was morose and cranky, pressing her for information as to the exact minute she planned to leave, and when she protested, he cried, “Listen, I’m not running this business for your beaux yeux! I’ve got to make a living. Nobody is going to take care of me when I’m an old lady!”

Annie washed out her few undergarments and packed up her clothes in an old leather suitcase of her father’s. Its edges were worn and scuffed. But it was a handsome bag. Hefting it, she felt a jolt of excitement. She was actually going to California! She noticed her father’s tweed jacket hanging in the closet. She shut the closet door with a bang. Let the next tenant have it.

The book Walter had given her to read, Man’s Fate, poked out from under the bed. Perhaps she would be able to finish it on the way west. She had read a few pages for Walter’s sake.

She thought, as she hung her underwear over the bathtub rim to dry, of the loan-company man, how he had never looked at her once—if he had just glanced at her, she would have been less ashamed at pawning those last reminders of her mother’s existence. Then she remembered Uncle Greg.

Oh, she ought to go and see him before she left! The bus to Nyack was only an hour, then a walk of a couple of miles up to the old house on the hill behind the cemetery. No. It was too late. But at least she would phone him.

She could see, as though her hand touched it, the bronze statue of lion and mouse that shared the table with the phone, which so seldom rang at this time of year—Uncle Greg’s slack season.