What has ever happened to me that was worth while?
What have I ever had except hard work and disappointment?
I am thirty-seven years old.

My youth is going, and I have nothing to show for it but ten years of dressmaking.

The best of my life is over, and when I look back on it, it is only a blank." It was as if the interview with the great man she had just left had completed the desolating retrospect of a lifetime.

Was there nothing but disenchantment ahead of her?
Was life merely the dropping of illusion after illusion, the falling of petals at the first touch from a flower that is beginning to fade?
"Yes, nothing has ever happened to me that was worth while," she repeated, forgetting her children for the moment.

Then, because the heavy air stifled her, she left the car and turned into West Twenty-third Street where the lights were coming out softly in the spring twilight.