He brought into view an unsuspected tube, with a cone of paper at its end, and bent over her mother, directing a stream of cold air against her head. “How do you feel?” he asked, with, Linda noticed, a startling loss of his first accent. Mrs. Condon so far felt well enough. Then, before Linda's startled gaze, every single one of the fifteen imprisoning tubes began to steam with an extraordinary vigor; not only did they steam, like teapots, but drops of water formed and slowly slid over her mother's face. If the process appeared weird at the beginning, now it was utterly fantastic.

The little white vapor spurts played about Mrs. Condon's dripping countenance; they increased rather than diminished; actually it resembled a wrecked locomotive she had once seen. “How are you?” M. Joseph demanded nervously. “Is it hot anywhere?” With a sudden gesture she replied in a shaking voice, “Here.”

Instantly he was holding the paper cone with its cold air against her scalp, and the heat was subdued. He glanced nervously at his watch, and Mrs. Condon managed to ask, “How long?”

“Twenty minutes.”

Dangerous as the whole proceeding seemed nothing really happened, and Linda's fears gradually faded into a mere curiosity and interest. A curtain hung across the door to the rest of the establishment, but it had been brushed partly aside; and she could see, in the compartment they had vacated, another man bending with waving irons over the liberated mass of a woman's hair. He was very much like M. Joseph, but he was younger and had only a dark scrap of mustache. As he caught up the hair with a quick double twist he leaned very close to the woman's face, whispering with an expression that never changed, an expression like that of the wax heads in the show-case. He bent so low that Linda was certain their cheeks had touched. She pondered at length over this, gazing now at the man beyond and now at M. Joseph flitting with the cold-air tube about her mother; wondering if, when she grew older, she would like a hair-dresser's cheek against hers. Linda decided not. The idea didn't shock her, the woman in the other space plainly liked it; still she decided she wouldn't. A different kind of man, she told herself, would be nicer.

Her thoughts were interrupted by a sharp, unpleasant odor—the odor of scorched hair; and she was absolutely rigid with horror at an agonized cry from her mother.

“It's burning me terribly,” the latter cried. “Oh, I can't stand it. Stop! Stop!”

M. Joseph, as white as plaster, rushed to the wall and reversed the handle, and Mrs. Condon started from the chair, her face now streaming with actual tears; but before she could escape the man threw himself on her shoulders.

“You mustn't move,” he whispered desperately, “you'll tear your hair out. I tell you no harm's been done. Everything is all right. Please, please don't cry like that. It will ruin my business. There are others in the establishment. Stop!” he shook her viciously.

Linda had risen, terrorized; and Mrs. Condon, with waving plucking hands, was sobbing an appeal to be released. “My head, my head,” she repeated. “I assure you”—the man motioned to a pallid girl to hold her in the chair. With a towel to protect his hand he undid a screw, lifted off the cap and untwisted the cotton from a bound lock of hair; releasing it, in turn, from the spindle it fell forward in a complete corkscrew over Mrs. Condon's face.

“Do you see!” he demanded. “Perfect. I give you my word they'll all be like that. The cursed heat ran up on me,” he added in a swift aside to his assistant. “Has Mrs. Bellows gone? Who's still in the place? Here, loose that binding ... thank God, that one is all right, too.”

Together they unfastened most of the connections, and a growing fringe of long remarkable curls marked Mrs. Condon's pain-drawn and dabbled face. Linda sobbed uncontrollably; but perhaps, after all, nothing frightful had happened. Her poor mother! Then fear again tightened about her heart at the perturbed expression that overtook the hair-dresser. He was trying in vain to remove one of the caps. She caught enigmatic words—“the borax, crystallized ... solid. It would take a plumber ... have to go.”

The connection was immovable. Even in her suffering Mrs. Condon implored M. Joseph to save her hair. Nothing, however, could be done; he admitted it with pale lips. The thing might be chiseled off; in the end he tried to force a release and the strand, with a renewal of Mrs. Condon's agony—now, in the interest of her appearance, heroically withstood—snapped short in the container.

Rapidly recovering her vigor, she launched on a tirade against M. Joseph and his permanent waving establishment—Linda had never before heard her mother talk in such a loud brutal manner, nor use such heated unpleasant words, and the girl was flooded with a wretched shame. Still another lock, it was revealed, had been ruined, and crumbled to mere dust in its owner's fingers.

“The law will provide for you,” she promised.

“Your hair was dyed,” the proprietor returned vindictively. “The girl who washed it will testify. Every one is warned against the permanent if their hair has been colored. So it was at your own risk.”

“My head's never been touched with dye,” Mrs. Condon shrilly answered. “You lying little ape. And well does that young woman know it. She complimented me herself on a true blonde.” The girl had, too, right before Linda.

“You ought to be thrashed out of the city.”

“Your money will be given back to you,” M. Joseph told her.

Outside they found a taxi, and sped back to their hotel. Above, Mrs. Condon removed her hat; and, before the uncompromising mirror, studied her wrecked hair—a frizzled vacancy was directly over her left brow—and haggard face. When she finally turned to Linda, her manner, her words, were solemn.

“I'm middle-aged,” she said.

A dreary silence enveloped them sitting in the dark reception-room while Mrs. Condon restlessly shredded unlighted cigarettes on the floor. She had made no effort to repair the damages to her appearance, and when the telephone bell sharply sounded, she reached out in a slovenly negligence of manner. Linda could hear a blurred articulation and her mother answering listlessly. The latter at last said: “Very well, at seven then; you'll stop for us.” She hung up the receiver, stared blankly at Linda, and then went off into a harsh mirth. “Oh, my God!” she cried; “the old ladies' home!”

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