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piece from her pocketbook and handed them to the little lady, who clutched them tight in her tiny hand.
    “All right, sweetheart,” the taxi driver said, “where do we go?”
    The little lady chuckled. “I’ll tell you after we start,” she said, and then, to Eleanor, “Good luck to you, dearie. Watch out from now on how you go knocking people down.”
    “Good-by,” Eleanor said, “and I’m really very sorry.”
    “That’s fine, then,” the little lady said, waving at her as the taxi pulled away from the curb. “I’ll be praying for you, dearie.”
    Well, Eleanor thought, staring after the taxi, there’s one person, anyway, who will be praying for me. One person anyway.

4
    It was the first genuinely shining day of summer, a time of year which brought Eleanor always to aching memories of her early childhood, when it had seemed to be summer all the time; she could not remember a winter before her father’s death on a cold wet day. She had taken to wondering lately, during these swiftcounted years, what had been done with all those wasted summer days; how could she have spent them so wantonly? I am foolish, she told herself early every summer, I am very foolish; I am grown up now and know the values of things. Nothing is ever really wasted, she believed sensibly, even one’s childhood, and then each year, one summer morning, the warm wind would come down the city street where she walked and she would be touched with the little cold thought: I have let more time go by. Yet this morning, driving the little car which she and her sister owned together, apprehensive lest they might still realize that she had come after all and just taken it away, going docilely along the street, following the lines of traffic, stopping when she was bidden and turning when she could, she smiled out at the sunlight slanting along the street and thought, I am going, I am going, I have finally taken a step.
    Always before, when she had her sister’s permission to drive the little car, she had gone cautiously, moving with extreme care to avoid even the slightest scratch or mar which might irritate her sister, but today, with her carton on the back seat and her suitcase on the floor, her gloves and pocketbook and light coat on the seat beside her, the car belonged entirely to her, a little contained world all her own; I am really going, she thought.
    At the last traffic light in the city, before she turned to go onto the great highway out of town, she stopped, waiting, and slid Dr. Montague’s letter out of her pocketbook. I will not even need a map, she thought; he must be a very careful man. “. . . Route 39 to Ashton,” the letter said, “and then turn left onto Route 5 going west. Follow this for a little less than thirty miles, and you will come to the small village of Hillsdale. Go through Hillsdale to the corner with a gas station on the left and a church on the right, and turn left here onto what seems to be a narrow country road; you will be going up into the hills and the road is very poor. Follow this road to the end—about six miles—and you will come to the gates of Hill House. I am making these directions so detailed because it is inadvisable to stop in Hillsdale to ask your way. The people there are rude to strangers and openly hostile to anyone inquiring about Hill House.
    “I am very happy that you will be joining us in Hill House, and will take great pleasure in making your acquaintance on Thursday the twenty-first of June. . . .”
    The light changed; she turned onto the highway and was free of the city. No one, she thought, can catch me now; they don’t even know which way I’m going.
    She had never driven far alone before. The notion of dividing her lovely journey into miles and hours was silly; she saw it, bringing her car with precision between the line on the road and the line of trees beside the road, as a passage of moments, each one new, carrying her along with them, taking her down a path of