Marian did not observe that, on his own showing, his assurance was without foundation. Her words had brought Mary vividly before her and, for a minute, she well-nigh forgot her own distress in the misery of that figure.
"She has had a great deal of trouble," said Marian. "Why, from what she told me, these girls must be worse treated than the blacks in the Congo; they must be far worse off than our own American negro slaves used to be."
"No doubt—if what she said was true. But I know it was not true. My profession has made me see a great deal of these poor women, and I know that if they are slaves it is because they want to be." He waved away the whole matter with a toss of his hand. He wanted some information, and he did not want to show why he wanted it. "That all goes to prove that if it was she who told you this foul story about me, then the story was that of a born liar," he declared. "You say she was here twice. What were the circumstances?"
She told him.
He breathed more freely. He had only to convince Marian and get her to quit her work in disgust before further gossip should reach her.
"And so you don't know her?" she concluded.
"No."
"Nor Mrs. Rose Légère?"
"I certainly know of that person," he said—it was the part of wisdom to admit some knowledge. "Nobody that knows anything about our police-courts, as I have had to know, can be entirely ignorant of her. She is one of the most notorious women in New York. I know a great deal about her, but, except for one occasion, when I saw her in a station-house, I have never set eyes on her in my life."
He spoke with such precision that Marian caught a gratified breath.
"Is she another Settlement visitor?" inquired Wesley, devoutly hoping that no miracle of reformation had, since their last meeting, been wrought upon Rose.
"No, she is not. It was she that was said to have been one of your—your friends, until she made friends with your political enemies. The girl that told me was, of course, the Mary Morton I have mentioned. She said that you were intimate with this Mrs. Légère, and I understood that even Mary——"
Dyker was genuinely glad to find some accusation that he could deny with truth.
"Never!" he cried.
Something in that word and his utterance of it made her look at him hard.
"She didn't want to tell the story," Marian insisted. "I got it from her. How could it have been the result of malice or a plot? Didn't I tell you that she said you had rescued her from the Légère woman's house?"
Dyker reflected. He wished that he had been as sweeping in his discrediting of Violet, under the pseudonym of Mary Morton, as he had been in his discrediting of Rose. Failing that, he might even have explained this rescue and have become something of a hero. Both opportunities were, however, gone. He must make the best of what remained.
"Marian," he said, speaking slowly, quite calmly, and with no small appearance of sincerity of purpose, "I needn't bring you any proof of this Légère woman's bad character—the qualities of that character you yourself know—and as for this Morton girl, I can only fall back on what I have already pointed out to you. You say she confesses her evil life: how can you, then, credit anything an admittedly abandoned creature may have told you?"
"Can't the worst of women tell the truth sometimes?"
"Practically never."
"But,"—Marian passed a weary hand across her forehead—"how could this girl be in a position to know what she says she knows, if she hadn't led just the kind of life that you say makes her an inevitable liar?"
It was an excellent sort of answer. Dyker tossed his head.
"I am hurt, Marian," he said. "I thought you had some faith in me; I thought you knew me. I don't see how you can persist in this attitude—how you can say these things. Why, I have been in your house: I have known you and your father; whereas these people—Marian, I love you; why should I lie to you?"
She had been keeping her hand upon her forehead, but she lowered it now to her eyes, where it was joined by its mate.
"I don't know," she moaned. "That's just it: I don't know."
"Then what," he asked, "can I do to convince you? I won't upbraid you; I won't be harsh. My sane course would be to pay no attention to accusations from such a character as this Mary Morton, and your sane course would be to pay no attention to them. But I know how things are in this neighborhood; I know the bad atmosphere you have been breathing ever since you came down here. Long ago I told you exactly what would happen; I foresaw it all. I told you when you insisted on going into this work that these women would poison your mind, distort your vision, make you doubt all that is best in life. Apparently, they have succeeded; but I don't speak of that. Marian, unless it was in some police-court—perhaps at the time I saw Rose Légère—I never saw this girl in my life. I don't understand her enmity any better than you do. It may spring from some imagined wrong to one of her friends, or it may be a political plot. But, except as it affects your regard for me, I don't care anything about it. All that I do care about, all that I do want to accomplish is to restore you to a normal view of things, get you out of these foul mental and material surroundings, and bring you back to your own proper world. I want to do this and to make you know the truth concerning myself. Tell me what will bring this about, and I'll do it without a moment's loss of time."
He thought that, in the nature of the case, there was nothing very difficult or inconvenient that she could demand; but he had counted too much on the artificial and too little upon the natural and primitive woman.
Her face still hidden, she felt the full force of his appeal, but the tempest had its wild will of her. She believed him guilty; she believed him innocent. She believed that, if he were guilty, temptation had come from the woman; she believed that, if he were innocent, there was nevertheless something—she did not know what—that he was hiding from her. Faith was ready to destroy much, but would not jealousy destroy more? Her jealousy had consumed dignity, it had ravaged custom, it was burning restraint.
Mary's words had drawn in Marian's mind a concrete picture, and the contemplation of that picture had awakened an anger in which her genuine love had for the first time genuinely expressed itself. Before, she could have heard with light regret of Dyker's engagement to marry another woman. Before, she might herself have drifted with him through a placid wooing into the port of marriage that, until this revelation, she had in no wise understood. But now she saw things specifically, and in the element of the specific the quality that she had known as "womanliness" was dissolved and the thing that she at last knew to be Woman was evolved.
The issue, she was thus still determined, depended upon proof of innocence. He must be clean, and she must know it.
She uncovered her fine face, strangely stronger for its grief.
"Wesley," she said, "I do remember all that you told me these women and this work would do to me. If you prove to be wrong, I shall stay on here, and, of course, never see you again; but if you prove to be right I shall give it up, and then, Wesley, I shall marry you."
He rose with a glad cry; but she, rising also, waved him back.
"Not yet," she said. "Either find Mary Morton and the proofs that she is dishonest—not only what I know she is, but dishonest in what she would say and do—show me this, or else——"
With straining resolution, he confronted her.
"Or else?" he prompted.
"Or else bring her to me with her own denial and explanation."
When Mary left Rivington Street she faced the inevitable. She had seen the impossibility of domestic service; she knew nothing of any other trade; she could not endure the shame of an institution, and her fortune consisted of just fourteen dollars and fifty cents.
She walked, for a long time, aimlessly. The night thickened and, block by block, the streets flashed into electric illumination, each separate flame glowing like a malevolent eye to show her misery. Her strength, never yet fully restored, failed her. Her feet were tired, her knees bent irregularly, her head ached. As at her first sight of it, the city, which she knew scarcely better than on that spring evening when she had been tossed into it, was a conscious prison implacably shutting her in forever.
She walked westward, and then northward. She dodged across Fifth Avenue among the automobiles of careless, comfortable people on their ways to one place or another of swift enjoyment. She passed a notorious café at the warm windows of which she saw, seated at laden tables and opposite leering men, the painted faces of softly gowned women, the more successful examples of what she soon must be. And she came to hurrying Broadway through whose crowds she saw silently and cunningly darting, with smiling hate written on their tired, rouged lips, the girls whose dawn was the lighting of the street-lamps and from whom she wanted to ask for instruction in the one means of livelihood that remained to her.
Her soul was as weakened and vitiated as her body, and by much the same forces. Into her escape from Rose's, into her work at Mrs. Turner's, into her appeal to the employment-agency and her tasks at Mrs. Chamberlin's she had put every particle of strength that she could harness, and the result had always been failure. The social system was too mighty. She could not prevail against it. She must do its bidding, and since it was so impractically constituted as to bid her prey upon it, her sole solace must be found in preying fiercely.
She turned into a cross-street, full of refulgent drinking-places that beckoned by swinging doors, behind which were the voices of singers and through which passed, in alone and out with shame-faced men, unending streams of women with white faces and vermillion mouths and sadly encircled eyes. But Mary pressed westward, though she did not clearly know her intention until, having crossed two avenues, she found that the cafés gave place to small shops, and that the shops were giving place to tall, moldy buildings with long stairways before them, houses that had once, plainly, made homes, but that were now, as plainly, barracks for lodgers.
From one of these she saw come a slight girl under a huge hat heavy with two great plumes. Mary waited until this girl drew near, first hesitated when she observed that the girl was scarcely fifteen, then spoke when she noted the bedizened dress and the face of which the childish beauty had been trained to maturity and hardness.
"Can you tell me if I can get a room around here?" she inquired.
The girl's knowing eyes studied her.
"Hello!" she said. "When did you hit the road?"
"To-day. I want to find a room."
"Well, you can't go wrong. The house I live in is full-up; but you can ring 'most any bell along here and get what you want. There ain't no choice. One's as bum as another."
She nodded saucily and went on her way, and Mary climbed the steps of the first house she came to.
Her ring was answered by a woman that appeared, as far as Mary could observe in the faint light, to be about sixty years old. Her hair was gray and severely arranged; her dress was shabby, and she looked very tired. To Mary she did not seem to be at all the type that would conduct the sort of place which the wanderer just then needed.
"Can you rent me a room?" she nevertheless inquired.
"With privileges?" asked the woman.
It was a phrase new to its hearer, but she understood that it described the kind of room she wanted.
"Yes," she almost whispered.
But the woman did not lower her voice. Her descent, as Mary afterwards learned, had been by slow stages, and her complaisance had been enforced through a history that began with the establishment of a respectable boarding-house, when a reform-election had driven her husband from the police-force, passed through a widowhood imposed upon by absconding lodgers and raised house-rents, and ended by the admission of first one and then many patrons that were, though they wanted what she had not always cared to give, at least certain to pay what she had to turn over to the church-corporation that owned the property.
"I got a nice second-floor front, just a step from the bath-room, at eighteen dollars," she said.
"A month?" inquired Mary.
The woman regarded her as if she were somewhat of a curiosity.
"Certainly not: eighteen a week."
"Oh, I—I couldn't afford that."
"It's a nice room."
"Yes, I guess it is, but——"
"I might let it to you for fifteen, to start with."
"I couldn't afford it."
"Well, there's the parlor. It's only twelve, an'll be vacant to-morrow."
"I'm afraid I'll have to get a place for to-night. Haven't you anything cheaper?"
"You don't seem to know nothin' about prices, miss." The landlady appeared to reflect. "But there's the third-floor back hall-room," she added; "I can let you have it for seven, an' better than that you can't do anywheres."
Mary hesitated.
"You can easy make three times that much," the woman urged.
"Do you——" Mary wet her dry lips. "Do you think so?"
"Think so? Why, the lady that had that room for a whole year till last week made as high as twenty dollars a night. She moved out o' here to her own flat. But then, she was good-looking, of course."
Mary had entertained some vague notion of a small gas-stove, and some saving in the matter of meals; but this the landlady could in no wise permit.
"The insurance sharks won't allow it," she said, and concluded in a tone that showed the later fact to be of more importance: "Besides, it so runs up the gas-bills."
Mary said no more. She paid for a week in advance, and was shown at once to the cell she had leased so dearly.
It was a little, gaudily-papered room scarcely fifteen feet long and not much more than two-thirds that in width. A stationary washstand was so placed that the door could not open freely. At the single narrow window stood an unsteady table of no apparent purpose, and along the side a clothes-press and a narrow, pine bureau. The bed, however, was the chief feature of furniture, and that was large and comfortable.
"I'll give you clean sheets every Sunday morning regular," said the landlady; "but any changes you want between you'll have to pay for the washin' of."
She demanded, and received, twenty-five cents for a latch-key, added that she permitted no noise in the rooms, and departed, leaving Mary sitting on the edge of the bed.
The girl's experiences in the house of Rose Légère had prepared her but imperfectly for this adventure. It was a new business, and Mary did not know how to embark upon it. She was as lost as the chorus-girl, unused to the purchase of railway tickets and the engaging of "hotel-accommodations," who finds herself stranded in a small town.
She went to the bureau and looked at herself in its distorting mirror, in an effort to appraise her wares. Her hollow cheeks needed rouge. Her dull eyes needed belladonna. Her clothes were worn. She felt that she should start work immediately, but she was afraid. She went to bed and slept.
By the next evening she had spent all but a dollar and some few cents of the seven dollars and a quarter that had remained to her. With her bundles under her aching arm, she was returning to her lodging-house to prepare for work, when she stopped at the "Ladies' Entrance" of the corner-saloon and, going into a bare apartment for a drink of whiskey, found, seated at a table, as the only other customer, the girl of whom she had asked her questions on the night before.
The child smiled as pleasantly as her hardened face would permit.
"Hello, kid," she said. "How's tricks?"
"Hello," replied Mary.
"Sit down here," said the girl.
Mary accepted her invitation, and gave the grinning waiter her order.
"Got settled?" asked the girl, when the waiter had come and gone again.
"Yes," replied Mary, "I got a room."
"Where?"
"The fifth door from here."
The girl whistled. She was proud of her knowledge.
"That old cat Charlotte Michaels!" she commented. "I bet she stuck you."
"She charges me seven dollars a week for a third-floor back hall-bedroom."
"Hell, that's a steal. Come next door to where I am, next week. There'll be a better room there, then, for a dollar less."
Mary looked at the child. It seemed strange that she should be about to ask of one perhaps two years her junior for directions in the ways of the street; but she saw that the childishness before her was childishness without innocence, was even lined and scarred by wisdom. She wondered about her own face.
"I'm goin' to start out to-night," she said.
In the etiquette of this trade the workers ask no questions of one another and offer few biographies save those fictitious ones, the threadbare, unimaginative lies, which they reserve for their inquisitive purchasers. Mary's entertainer, therefore, put forward no inquiries save one:
"New in this town?" she asked.
"I'm new in the business," said Mary.
The child eyed her doubtingly.
"Come off," she good-naturedly replied.
"Yes, I am. I was in a house onc't, but I'm new to this, an' I ain't just sure how to go about it."
"Oh," said the child, "it's dead easy to learn the curves, but it's the hardest job in the world. Can't your fellow put you wise?"
"My fellow?"
"Sure, your fellow, your friend, your sweetheart. Honest, now; ain't you workin' for nobody?"
"No."
"Well, you ought to be. Most all the girls is. You can't get along right without one. Who's goin' to go your bail when you're pinched?"
"Will I be pinched?"
"About as often as onc't a month, kid—unless you let the cop call onc't a week."
"I guess I can stand him," said Mary. She was past the stage of objections.
"You'll have to pay him anyhow, you know."
"I thought I might have to."
"Then you thought dead right. Why don't you get a fellow? They's lots of them. They got political pulls. Of course, they don't leave you much money for yourself, but they certainly can fix things up for you."
"Have you a fellow?" asked Mary.
"I sure have," said the child, grandly. "My girl friend an' I have had one between us ever since we left school last June."
"Does he treat you right?"
"As good as any. He beats us up once in a while when we don't earn enough, or when he's more than usual lit up. But he keeps the cops away, an' he gets us good trade, an' he's true to the two of us. He'd ought to be; we make good money for him."
Mary listened in a kind of awe.
"You like him?" she asked.
"I love him," the child emphatically declared. "Lots of the girls hates their fellows, but daren't leave 'em because their fellows'd have 'em pinched right off—but I love mine. You ought to get one. I'll put you next."
"No," said Mary, "I think I'll wait; but I wish I knew the curves."
"Oh, hell; it's dead easy, I tell you." The child gulped her whiskey and went on: "You just put on your glad rags at eight o'clock an' walk Broadway from Twenty-third to Forty-second. If you can hustle, you can land half a dozen before one o'clock. When they give you the glad eye, take it, an' when they don't, just you walk by 'em sort of hummin' under your breath. Stop an' look in the store-windows, an' they'll come like flies. But always be sure to get your money first. Ask 'em two dollars if they look that strong, or one if they're cheap guys—but don't ever take a cent less'n fifty cents. I always gets the two-plunk myself, unless a piker stands out for a dark corner or hallway and tries the quarter game: then I go through his clothes for all he's got."
Mary rose, with averted eyes.
"Thank you," she said.
"Oh, that's all right," said the child. "You just take my tip, an' you'll make good."
And, if by managing, by the most detestible sort of work, to keep clothes upon her back, food in her stomach and a roof over her head, was making good, Mary did it. Everything fell out as the little girl had described. That night the adventurer, with no alternative, sank the last of her scruples, and, when her room-rent next fell due, she paid it and had a margin of several dollars to place in her stocking.
There was not, she found, very much to be saved, for the whole world seemed to mark her as legitimate prey.
First, the policemen were quick to see that she was an unprotected newcomer, and, one by one, to stop her and threaten her with arrest. In the beginning, she was afraid to slip them their tithes, and did it timidly and awkwardly; but, when she saw how jauntily and graciously they accepted payment, she had the bills always ready at the time when they were expected and, with the bills, the caresses that, not infrequently, had to accompany them.
Other expenses were proportionate. Rent gained upon the advance of prosperity. Showy clothes, if not the best, were a necessity, and the second-hand shops raised their prices on the suspicion of her profession. Rainy nights came, when there was almost no business to be done. The work was of a character that required sturdy food, and this must be bought in restaurants tacitly conducted for her class and charging accordingly. The men, she soon discovered, were as loath to buy her a supper as they were ready to buy her drinks, a condition the sole consolation of which was the fact that alcohol dulled whatever remained of the fine edge of sensibility.
Some of her cursory Antonies, regarding their transactions as they regarded their other business affairs, were honest, but most were honest only when they had to be, and to them Mary and her kind were beasts of burden not worthy of the stipulated hire. There were the lechers that wanted only to waste the busy minutes in unremunerative talk; there were the seekers that endeavored to secure through hideous formulæ of affection what they were too mean frankly to purchase; there were the hypocritical male animals that, above suspicion in their daylight life, considered the women of the night as fair game for cheating, and then there were the careful toads, who prided themselves upon their shrewdness, and who bargained and haggled as a man would be ashamed to bargain and haggle for a dog.
It was a trade of hard hours, hard walking, and hard drinking, and, in the glaring cafés where she often sat with her fellow-workers waiting to be smiled at by the hunters, Mary, though she met many girls that fared worse than herself, met few that, when truthful, told of faring better. The woman that quitted her landlady's care for "a flat of her own" represented the ideal toward which this whole army was hoping, but was an ideal mythical.
Nearly all were working in health and out, and saving nothing. Nearly all were in bondage to taskmasters that slunk along after them through the streets, saw them strike a bargain, waited in the shadows of a nearby house until the wage was paid, and then came forward, before the customer had turned the corner, to exact their tribute. Born, through the effects of a wasteful industrial system, in cellars upon beds of rags, herded as children in attics where a family of ten slept in a space too small for five, bred in poverty, always underfed and never properly protected from the weather, some of them were used to hardship that no decent social justice would ever have permitted. Others had been lured from comfortable homes. Still others were the faster fettered because they had gone from homes too respectable to allow of any return. But almost everyone, through fear of exposure, dread of jail and reformatory, and awe of their owners' political influences, was the chattel of a slavery as thorough as that of which Max Grossman was a minor instrument.
The majority of these toilers were ready to receive, or had long since received, the seeds of tuberculosis; few could continue their work for five years, and ninety-five per cent., as a drunken young college undergraduate one evening cheerfully informed Mary, were suffering from one or other, and sometimes from all three, of the trio of diseases common to their business. Out from those stuffy bedrooms and those smoke-clouded, song-filled cafés, men carried the scourging social illnesses to innocent wives and to unborn children destined to dwarfed or sightless lives. The sufferer might believe himself cured and bear infection years later.
"Now, take yourself, for instance," the lad had resumed, his cheeks still rosy with youth, but his eyes aflame with liquor. "I know something about these things; but I couldn't tell whether you were free or not. You might be sick a long time before even you could tell, and then you wouldn't risk starvation by telling about it. You might be sick right now for all I know. But look out for the worst of all!"
Mary heard him with as little heed as she had heard most men. She had learned all that he said from women who knew more of it than, she hoped, this boy would ever know, and she had been well assured that it was a danger that no preventive could wholly defy and no care be certain to escape.
After all, she used to reflect, nothing much mattered. She had nothing pleasant to look forward to and, therefore, she wisely refrained, save for one advancing idea, from looking forward. She had no past that did not have its pain for her vision, and, therefore, with this sole exception, she resolutely kept her eyes upon the present day.
Yet gradually one great passion was growing within her. That process of thought which had begun in her encounter with Philip Beekman, when she left his mother's employment, had been hastened in its growth by what Marian Lennox had said and failed to do, and the shock of the girl's embarkation upon her new profession had only momentarily retarded it. She was not large enough—few of us are—to see the conditions behind the individual, nor yet greatly to concern herself with individuals that did not directly concern her; but she saw clearly her own plight, and now saw, or thought she saw, that this plight was due entirely to the machinations of the man who had taken her from her home and brought her to New York. She could have loved him, and so she hated him; she could still feel a tenderness for what he might have been, so she permitted herself to feel only animosity for what he had proved himself to be. To him she traced directly all that had befallen her, and as she could not go beyond him, so from him, she slowly and finally resolved, she would exact payment. That thought waxed in her tired mind; it was fed with every throe of her pained body until it dominated her circumscribed outlook upon the world. It even saved her from suffering, because it so possessed her that it armored her against all lesser things. She had found, at last, a purpose in life.
It was almost coincident with her realization of this that Mary realized something else. She went immediately to a physician.
Dr. Helwig, a man with an enormous paunch and a round face and triple chin, was one of the many excellent practitioners that depend for their living—and it is a good one—upon the class to which Mary belonged. He treated the matter for what it was: a commonplace in his day's work. At the end of a week he confirmed her fears.
For a moment she reeled under the blow. The bookcases with their ponderous volumes in dark bindings, the shelves burdened with phials, the glass medicine-case, the convertible table for minor operations, the crowded desk, and even the fat physician before it, seemed to whirl in a mad saraband.
"Come, come!" she heard the doctor say, as he thrust an uncorked bottle of smelling-salts under her nose.
"How long will it last?" she panted.
"We must keep up our treatment for six months or a year," he answered. "Meantime, diet and quiet. No liquor. If you were a millionaire, I'd prescribe a long sea-voyage or a trip to Hot Springs."
Out of the chaos of her brain a sudden idea was shaping.
"What," she inquired, "about other people catching this?"
He knew her business perfectly, and he knew that what he had to say on this point would weigh but little in the scale against want. Nevertheless, he made the common answer.
After that she listened to all the instructions that he gave her. More than ever now she had her purpose in life.
A week later, in a lamp-lighted street, Mary and Carrie met. Each girl was too conscious of her own business to remark that it was the business of her acquaintance, and each tried to avoid the other; but before recognition was complete they were face to face. Silence was confession. Mary spoke.
"Hello," she said, "it's a long time since I seen you. How are you, anyways?"
Carrie, though still a homely girl, wore a close-fitting coat that made the best of her figure. Her hat was wide and new and, as she answered, she turned from the light.
"Pretty well," she said, and paused short.
"I guess," said Mary, "you thought it was queer, my never comin' to see you; but I haven't had a single chance. I'll come soon, honest I will. How's Katie?"
"I don't know," Carrie slowly answered, "I'm not living with her any more."
"You ain't? Since when ain't you?"
"Oh, I don't know—a couple of weeks."
"You two didn't scrap?"
"No. I had to go away." And then, to divert the fire, Carrie added: "Are you still working at that place the Settlement-people got for you?"
"No, I left that long ago. Have you gone back to the shirtwaist-factory?"
"I couldn't: the strike was never settled, and, anyhow, they wouldn't have taken me back if I'd been willing to go."
Mary looked at the long coat and the gray hat.
"But, say," she began, "you don't look——"
Her eyes dropped to Carrie's and, suddenly, she knew. Her voice softened.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I had to do it, too."
Silently they touched hands. The Lithuanian's breast rose and fell quickly.
"I couldn't do anything else," said Carrie, but only in explanation, not in extenuation or excuse. "There was no other work I could do."
"I know," said Mary.
"And everywhere I went," continued Carrie, "he followed me. He was always just behind me when I walked, always just around the corner when I stood still. When I was dizzy and hungry, he always looked well fed and always had the money in his hand. He waited, waited, waited."
"You mean your fellow?" Mary asked.
Carrie assented. "If you can call him that," she said. "He has two or three others working for him, or he'd be across the street now. I'm different from them—freer. I'm not afraid of him, and so he is a little afraid of me."
Mary took the girl's arm.
"They won't let us stop this way on the pavement," she said. "Come in here and have a drink."
They went into the women's room of one of the quieter saloons. Mary, mindful of the doctor's directions, took only carbonated water, but Carrie ordered whiskey.
Mary, with her stomach crying out for the alcohol, and, in that wrenching desire, nearly seizing her companion's liquor, sipped the water.
"I've quit it," she averred. "It don't pay."
"Most of the men make you take it," said Carrie.
"Yes," Mary admitted, "but you can chuck it on the floor if you're fly." She took another sip of the water, and then asked: "Why don't you shake this man if you're not scared of him. You can come with me, you know."
"It wouldn't be good business," Carrie declared. "I need somebody with influence to look after me in case I'm arrested."
Mary was silent for a minute, thinking.
"Perhaps you're right," she granted; "there's one of 'em I'd like to find."
"Who is it?"
"I'll tell you sometime.—Look here: I don't feel like workin' Broadway to-night, an' I've got some money. Let's do a dance-hall."
They "did" several. At the first a mask-ball was in progress; the bachanalian guests had rented extravagant costumes; confetti was tossed by the onlookers, and swiftly shifting lights of red and blue, of green and purple, played upon the dancers, whose whirling shadows, monstrously magnified, were thrown upon sheeted walls. At another, there was an explosion of obscene epithets followed by a fight, which made retreat advisable; and at a third, the dances were so short and the intervals provided for the solicitations of the waiters were so long that both girls wearied of the scene.
On Tenth Avenue they at last found, however, a place more to their liking. It was the usual type of room, enlarged by tearing out the thin partitions that had once divided it into several tenements. The lights shone sick through the clouding smoke, and the air was heavy with the odors of dust, tobacco, alcohol, and sweat. But the music was lively, the floor crowded, and the little tables along the walls were surrounded by laughing groups of drinking men and women. Of the former, though most were hollow-chested, pale-cheeked, hawk-nosed, some showed clearly that they came to plunder; and if the majority of the latter were gum-chewing working-girls still in their earliest teens, many were of the variety to which the two newcomers now belonged.
Mary and her companion sat down at a table near the door. They nodded to the burly, cigar-smoking "Boss," who moved energetically about, urging bloodless lads to find partners, and now and then himself taking a turn with a neglected girl. They exchanged familiar greetings, though they had never before seen her, with the false-jeweled woman whose business it was to assist the boss in stimulating the dancers by precept and example. And they watched the scene with a gaze grave and calculating.
Here a child of thirteen, with closed eyes and her peach-tinted cheek against her pimpled partner's, undulated to the music, scarcely moving her feet. Nearby there whirled, like a dervish, a girl to whose consumptive face the revolutions brought a glow that mimicked health. Now and then a woman would leap from one of the tables, embrace an unembarrassed man about the neck and so waltz off with him, at once passionate and mocking, both of them deaf to the plaudits of their spectators. From time to time the lights were suddenly extinguished, and the dance went on in the darkness amid a chorus of kisses, cries, and giggling. Most of the boys and men, and nearly all of the little girls, were drunk.
Among the dancers, doubtless plying his trade, Mary saw Rafael Angelelli, sleek and radiant in a new suit of pale buff. He detected her a little later and, disposing of a pure-faced child, who had been in his arms, made a skillful way to his old acquaintance. He shook Mary's reluctant hand and, nodding to Carrie as if she were a familiar friend, sat down between the two women.
"Where you been?" he affably inquired of Mary.
"Out of town," said Mary, coldly.
Angel shrugged his shoulders. He knew she lied, but he rarely contradicted a lady.
"Meester Dyk' been lookin' all over theesa town for you, Violet," he said.
Mary did not like the news. She was still afraid that she might be wanted in connection with her contradictory affidavits.
Angel, however, readily reassured her. Just what Dyker wanted he did not, he said, know; but he was certain that it was something for her benefit. The magistrate had commissioned him to find her, and Angel had been searching, sporadically, for several weeks, even tracing her course back to the employment-agency and to that Mrs. Turner's where she had first worked.
"Theesa woman say you steal," said the Italian.
"She's a liar," answered Mary, hotly.
"She say she tol' you so."
"She tried to make out I took a cake of soap."
"But she say after you leave she meess two dollar an' some silka stockin'."
"That woman never wore no silk stockin's in her life, an' there wasn't two dollars in the house."
Again the Italian shrugged his shoulders. He gave Mary to understand that, in his opinion, any woman who could steal and did not was a fool, and that any woman who stole and acknowledged it was a worse fool. But what, plainly, most interested him was the execution of his commission from Dyker. He talked so earnestly about it that he failed entirely to lay Mary's fears. She refused to give him her address, and as soon as he had left the table she endeavored to quit the hall.
The entrance of an acquaintance detained her. There were words that had to be said and drinks that had to be bought. Half an hour passed, and then, as she started with Carrie for the door, Mary saw Wesley Dyker standing outside. He was wrapped in a heavy overcoat with its military collar turned up about his chin and his black derby pulled far over his eyes; but Mary feared him too much to fail of recognition.
"There he is!" she whispered, catching her companion's arm. "The Dago telephoned him. I was afraid of that."
Escape was hopeless. She sent Carrie back to the dancers, and, going out, met Dyker, her head erect.
"I heard you was lookin' for me," she said.
Wesley raised his hat.
"Yes," he said dryly; "walk a block or two with me."
They went for some time in silence, Mary too much upon the defensive to risk beginning a conversation, and Dyker trying in vain to command the anger that had been growing with every day since he had learned how she had betrayed him to Marian. At the first dark street into which he turned her, his resentment burst its guard.
"What in hell do you mean by telling everybody all you know about me?" he demanded.
Mary shrank away.
"No, you don't!" he said, and seized her hand. "Didn't I do you the best turn that was ever done you?"
"Yes," the woman quavered. "An' I wouldn't pay you back the way you say I done. I never talked about you to nobody."
"Don't lie. You know you did."
Mary remembered, but she shook her head determinedly.
"I've never once spoke your name," she said.
"I tell you to stop lying!" rejoined Dyker. "You told it once at the Settlement on Rivington Street. I know it. I learned it there myself."
"What did I tell?" asked Mary. Her tone was defiant, but her endeavor was to draw his fire.
They walked forward.
"You said I hung out at Rose's," he protested. "You said I was her lover and yours."
"I never said I had nothing to do with you, Mr. Dyker. I don't care who told you I did; I never said no such thing."
"You said I went to Rose's. I know you did."
She confessed to that, for she was truly sorry for it.
"But I didn't mean to, Mr. Dyker," she added; "honest, I didn't. It just slipped out. I didn't know Miss Marian knowed you. Why, she told me she didn't know you, an' how'd I ever think she'd lie?"
That was a question which, ignorant of Miss Lennox's precise method of evasion, Wesley did not, even to himself, attempt to answer.
"It didn't matter whether she knew me or not," he said; "you had no right to tell it."
"I know that. It just slipped out. But it won't never happen again. I wasn't so wise as I am now."
"I hope not," he said, a trifle mollified by the sincerity in her tone. "But you've done me a big amount of harm there, Violet, and you have got to undo it."
Her first sensation had been one of relief in finding that her false affidavit was not held against her; her next had been fright at his anger; but now she was all penitence for the ill she had wrought him. Dyker was the one man in New York that had done her a kindness, and she held that kindness as the greatest possible.
"What do you want?" she asked. "I'd do most anything for you, Mr. Dyker: you know that."
They were under the uncertain light of a crossing. He eyed her narrowly, mistrustingly.
"I want you," he replied, "to come to my office to-morrow evening at six. Here's my card. Will you do it?"
She took the card and thrust it through the opening of her shirtwaist.
"What do you want with me when you get me there?" she wondered.
"I want you to come with me to Miss Lennox, and deny the story that you told her about me."
Mary's heart sank. She could not bear the thought of facing Marian.
"What's the use o' that?" she pleaded.
"What's the use? Why, how else are you going to put me right with her?"
"But I couldn't."
"You must."
"I couldn't, Mr. Dyker. Honest, I couldn't. She'd know I was lyin' to her."
"You leave that to me."
"What excuse'd I give her?"
"We'll fix that up to-morrow."
"Please don't make me do it, Mr. Dyker!"
"I've got to. What else can I do?—It's all your own fault. What's your address?"
She gave it to him tremulously.
"All right," he said. "I'll have a cab there for you to-morrow at five-thirty."
Her body shook with frightened sobs.
"Oh, Mr. Dyker," she repeated, "please don't make me do this! I'd do anythin', 'most, under the sun for you; but I can't face Miss Marian—honest to God, I can't."
What he should have done was to play upon her gratitude, but what he did do was again to allow his mistrust and anger to have their rein.
"I won't have any nonsense about this, Violet," he said. "If you don't come to my office to-morrow at six, I'll have you arrested—and I'll see to it that you won't escape with a mere fine, either."
"It won't——" She could not grasp it. "What do you mean?" she asked.
"I mean I'll have you arrested on a big charge."
Her lips stiffened with that common terror of the law, about the only terror that the law ever succeeds nowadays in creating: the unreasoning terror that seldom serves as a deterrent.
"I ain't done nothin' but this," she said, in the full knowledge that what she had or had not done would be no factor in the problem.
"You'll find out about that when the time comes," he answered. "What I want to know is whether you'll do me this favor or not."
He had stopped and confronted her. Even in the semi-darkness her anxious eyes managed to read his pale, determined face, but even in the daylight they could have found there no relenting.
She gave him a despairing smile.
"I guess I've got to," she said.
"Yes, you'll have to."
"All right."
"You'll do it?"
"I'll do it, all right."
"No bluff?"
"No."
"Remember: if you don't, I'll fix you."
Mary turned away.
"I'll not forget," she said.
"If you don't," he called after her, "you won't be sorry."
"I won't forget," she repeated.
And yet, even as she walked away from him, the sickness of indecision was upon her. Like all narrow experiences, her narrow experience made her afraid of everything beyond its own limits. Her habit of life was the habit of the weakened bird of prey that attacks only the defenseless and flies before the strong. She had become a moral coward, and the progress of her physical disease directly accentuated the insidious encroachments of her moral illness. She could not openly face Marian; she did not dare openly to defy Dyker. She wanted only to run away.
By four o'clock the next afternoon she had run away. The night had been a wearisome journey backward and forward between the decision to obey the magistrate and the decision to evade him. She thought that she owed him much, but she knew that she could not successfully face Marian and lie. She was tremblingly afraid of Wesley's vengeance, but she was more afraid of Marian's honest eyes. All day she lay upon her bed, dizzy from this circling process of thought, but at last, in an attack of dread of the lie more severe than any that had preceded it, she flung her clothes into a little trunk, which she had recently purchased, and, calling a cab, drove to a new lodging-house.
She did not go out that evening, but the next she had to go, and she had not been on Broadway for two hours before a plain-clothes man touched her arm.
"I'm sorry, kid," he said, "but you've got to come along with me."
Instinctively she recoiled, but the detective's fingers had slipped to her wrist and tightened on it. The sword had fallen.
"Where to?" she asked.
She knew the man. She had given him money, and more than money, yet she expected no mercy, expected nothing but an explanation.
"Jefferson Market," said her captor. "But if you've got anybody handy who'll go your bail, I'll take you to see him first, before we go down to Ninth Street."
Mary shook her head. Helpless horror had her for its own.
"No use," she answered.
"Are you sure?" he asked.
"Certain sure," she said, and then, a little wistfully: "I guess there ain't no good in tryin' to talk business to you?"
The detective was a big, black-mustached man. His face was not unkindly, but he was helpless.
"No," he said; "this here's orders from the front. If you haven't got some fellow to be ready with bail, I guess we'd better hurry up."
They crossed to Sixth Avenue and walked down that noisy thoroughfare to the towering brick fortress that stands like a castle to guard the gateway of old Greenwich Village.
By day that somber building seems to hide behind the grim planks of the elevated railroad; it is ugly, neglected, innocent; under its protecting wings are the stalls of white-aproned butchers and the open establishments of green-grocers and hucksters plying their several occupations. But no sooner does the darkness drop its curtain over the webbed streets, the dirty courts, and the foul alleys that surround the place, than Jefferson Market ceases to be a building for the dispensation of food and becomes a court for the dispensation of the commodity that we carelessly label Justice. The hands of the large clock in the high tower are hurried toward the hour of twelve; long rays of sinister light are shot from windows narrow and barred; and under a vaulted entrance-way there pours, from year's end to year's end, an unending army of those women of the street who have lost, for one reason or another, their ability any longer to purchase the protection of the Law.
It is not often that what the statutes designate as crime comes to the Night Court: Crime may wait for the morning. It is the drunkard, the vagrant, the licenseless pedlar, and, above all, unfriended Maria Peripatetica, the human being that humanity has spoiled in the making, who is taken there. Above all, the Marias Peripateticæ that have, once fostered by the Law, quarreled with it, failed to bribe it, or openly rebelled against it. Black and white, short-skirted and gray-haired, besilked and bedraggled, from nine in the evening until early morning, five thousand in a twelvemonth, they are brought to the Jefferson Market Court for judgment from the power that has made them what they are.
And judgment is what they receive. The law is a mill that was made to grind out one thing, and can grind no other; the courts were constituted to make criminals and to punish them, not to prevent or to cure; our present justice is not mercy; it is formulæ, not sentiment. There is one woman that has some small authority in this tribunal, one woman that sees an occasional girl with some promise in her face and takes her away to Waverley House for observation and to be given, if all goes well, a chance at other employment; but Waverley House is small, it is poor, and there is small chance for her that has been twice stricken. One woman cannot do much against the grinding mill, and the grinding mill, between January and December, sends only seventeen girls to a semi-sane reformatory as compared to three thousand that it sends to the university of crime which is known as "The Island."
Mary was hurried up a short flight of stone steps and into a small hallway. A metal gate was opened for her and snapped shut as she passed it. A stocky man took her name and address and got, from her conductor, in a voice that she could not hear, the charge on which she had been arrested, and then, after one turn to the left and another to the right, she was shoved through a door and into a brightly-lighted, heavily-barred detention-pen.
Dazedly, she looked about. Beside her, upon one side, sat a gray-haired woman of sixty, too old any longer to earn that tribute which would have secured her immunity for the prosecution of the trade she must recently have adopted. Nearby was a girl of thirteen, who, temporarily neglected by her owner, had been arrested for the same offense. On the bench sat a fat negress who informed all listeners that she was falsely charged with picking the pocket of a bald-headed white man that she had solicited. Over them all streamed the pitiless light of strong lamps, upon them all were soon to feast the eyes of the crowd in the near court-room.
The newcomer bowed her head. She did not know that a court-retainer had been waiting her arrival. She did not know that, as soon as she had entered, this retainer had hurried to a telephone. She did not know that, in answer to this call, Rafael Angelelli had hurried to the door that she had just passed, and there presented a note bearing a potent signature. She did not even know that these things were of common enough occurrence, and she was aware of only her misery until she heard the Italian's low voice and saw him beckoning her to the bars.
She almost ran toward him. The other prisoners gathered about her, but the officer that accompanied Angel waved them away, and himself drew back. Mary clutched the bars as if they had been a tangible hope.
"Angel!" she whispered.
But Angelelli fronted her, scowling. He shook a tight fist under her shrinking eyes.
"You are a dam' fool!" he answered.
Mary could not articulate. Her lips involuntarily found an unthought query, but her voice was dumb.
"Why you not leesten to theesa Wesley Dyk'?" pursued Rafael. "Now maybe you go to the Island. You know what that mean? Theesa jailers cut off your hair, beat you up every mornin', every evenin' regular. No meals; only bread an' water; no wheeskey. An' when you come out every cop hava you' peecture an' you get arrest' each time an' senta back again to jail!"
She believed him. She would have believed anything that was said to her by someone she had previously known. With a flow of ready tears that blinded her sunken eyes, she begged him to tell her of some way of escape.
Angel was ready with his answer. It seemed that he still represented Wesley Dyker and that Mr. Dyker was not disposed to be so hard on her as impartial justice demanded that he should be. In the back-room of a nearby saloon there were a lawyer and a notary in waiting. If Mary would promise to swear to and sign before them a prepared paper denying the accusations she had made to Marian, Angel would now, by means of a second note, see that the sitting magistrate did but fine her, and would hand her at once the amount of that fine.
She had supposed that her arrest had been on the charge of larceny from Mrs. Turner's boarding-house; she had not known that she was accused of no more than the practice of her trade, and she could scarcely credit news so good as this which Angel brought her.
"An' I won't have to go to Miss Marian?" she asked.
"No. Meest' Dyk' want thees paper for hees girl—jus' to square heemself witha hees girl—no more. You go where you want."
"An' the judge'll let me off?"
"Right away."
She promised, and a moment later was led into the court-room.
She saw the gaping, leering crowd, which filled half of that apartment beyond the low grating. She saw the stolid policemen herding their charges as stockyard hands herd cattle for the slaughter. She saw the stealthy slavers buzzing in and out, bent upon nefarious rescue; the waiting lawyers on the outer bench and the laughing lawyers inside, joking together or making mirth before the desk at which, in his black robe, sat the weary, cynical, indifferent magistrate, his face as expressionless as that of a Chinese Joss. She heard, between the roars of elevated trains, the unintelligible oaths, administered, as she now understood that the average oath is administered, with a rapidity that robbed them of all dignity and most effect; the drone of testimony constantly interrupted to the point of confusion and always curtailed to the exclusion of essential truth; the mechanical pronouncement of sentence that ended, as if the two things were on phrase, in the summoning of the succeeding case. All this she saw and heard and disregarded. She had been struck down, trapped, held fast in the grip of the invisible enemy that she thought of as the City. She had been conscious of nothing but the living Fear, and now, Angel had told her, some portion of relief was at hand.
Her arraignment, the payment of her fine, her meeting with the waiting Italian, her progress to the nearby saloon where the lawyer and the notary were ready for her—all this passed like a vision of the night. She signed without reading it—though she would not have understood it if she had read it—the formal denial to which her affirmation was immediately affixed. She was too dazed to think until, leaving the three smiling men behind her, she had turned again into free Sixth Avenue.
It was then that she saw coming toward her a young man—a young man that might have been anywhere from nineteen to thirty-two—with hair that was dark and curly, sorely-shaven olive cheeks just showing the defeated tokens of a blue-black beard; a dapper, prosperous young man, with thick lips and hard eyes and a smartly cut overcoat, from one pocket of which flashed a brilliant-bordered handkerchief.
In the instant Mary's exhaustion dropped from her brain and shoulders. She forgot her fright of the earlier evening; she remembered only the sufferings from which it had arisen. Her waiting had not, after all, been vain. She was calm, she was resourceful, she was resolved.
"Hello, Max," she said.
At first he did not know her. He stood there, while their eyes were locked, in his own eyes no gleam of honest memory. He was unchanged—the serene, the secure, the smug Max Grossman of that first meeting in the street of her little Pennsylvania town; but she, as she so well knew without this silent testimony, was not now, and never again could be, the girl of that lost springtime. He looked at her, his thick lips drawn thin in a professional grimace, and not until she spoke a second time did he recognize her.
He started then, and his olive face went pale; but Mary put out her hand precisely as if she were meeting, after a brief absence, only an acquaintance of the everyday friendly sort, and Max, too glad for pardon to question motive, seized and squeezed her hand tenderly.
"Vhat?" he cried in mock pleasure at thiscontretemps. "No, itain'd! I gan't hardly belief mine eyes you're lookin' so fine. But itisMary Denbigh!"
She smiled almost gayly. In little she had to lie, but in much, though for a reason that he must not suspect, she was indeed exultant.
"I am lookin' good, ain't I, Max?" she said.
He surveyed her cheap finery; saw her hair, disordered in her passage through the crowded court-room, and turned his gaze quickly from her hollow, painted cheeks, her hardening carmine mouth, and her heavily ringed eyes.
"You'regrand," he said. "I always knew you'd make good, Mary."
"You jollier!" she laughed, and with her free hand, patted his olive cheek.
"No, it'shonest, so help me."
"Then don't you want to buy me a drink, Max?"
Grossman dropped her hand. His face grew doubtful.
"I vish I haddime," he said, "but I god to see a friend down the Avenue, an'——"
"A lady, Max?"
"Ach, no, Mary."
"Then let him go. You ought to be glad to take a walk with as good-lookin' a girl as you say I am."
For another fleeting instant Max let his eyes rest on her face, then lowered them. He looked at the pavement and drew an awkward line upon it with the edge of his tan boot-sole. More significant than any physical change in her was the fact that she could now embarrass him.
"I know, Mary," he stammered; "but, you see, this here feller vhat I tol'——"
She laughed again. She thrust her arm through his and turned his face uptown.
"Forget it!" she said. "Don't you worry, Max; I ain't goin' to rake things up, if that's what's souring you. Life's too short. All I want is a talk and a drink."
Half reluctantly, he let her lead him; but she could lead him and that sufficed her.
He lit an American cigarette and puffed it nervously.
"I've just been in there," she said, with a backward jerk of her head in the direction of the police-court.
"There?" Max was not surprised, but he added: "Vhat vas you doin' in there?"
"What do you think?" responded Mary. She herself was thinking rapidly—about other things.
"You vasn't in drouble?"
"I guess you would call it that."
"Pinched?"
"Yes."
He had asked her no questions about her past—but concerning her present he chanced a query.
"Mary," he inquired, "do you mean they god you up fer your beesiness?"
"That's about it," she said.
"But vhy don't you square you'self vith the goppers?"
"I don't know. I—I was broke, Max."
"I vish I gouldhelpyou, Mary," he said, his curiosity cooling at the thought of an appeal for assistance.
She saw it, and it amused her.
"Can't you do it?" she asked, dropping her voice into a whine.
He tried to draw away from her, but her linked arm held him affectionately fast.
"I been havin' rotten luck," he declared; "somethin' awful. I ain't got hardly only the money vhat's in myglothes."
"Well, then," said Mary, looking at the clothes and knowing well that they somewhere concealed an ample yellow sum, "why don't you take me on your staff?"
"Mary," he cried, trying to spread his hands, and failing dismally with the one that her pinioning arm hampered, "vhat do you think I am? A millionaire? I ain't got no staff."
"Come off!" she bantered.
"I ain't—honest."
"Still in the other line?" she persisted. "I thought you might be trottin' 'em on the street—they say there's more in it. Why do you stick to supplyin' the flats and the houses?"
Her voice was the perfection of good nature, but he writhed under it.
"Mary!" he pleaded.
"Well," she said, disregarding his tone, and keeping his arm fast in her own, "you do supply 'em, don't you? I know one fellow who makes his livin' goin' the rounds, findin' what girls is sore on their madams an' then gettin' a commission by sneakin' 'em out an' changin' 'em to new flats. He lets on he's sellin' kimonas, but one sample's lasted him three years."
"Mary!" repeated Max, more weakly.
"That's the truth," she said, and then: "But can't you start street-work an' take me on your staff?"
Again he looked at her,
"No," he answered.
"Not young enough lookin' now, eh?" She was still smiling.
"Ach," he protested, "you oughtn't nod to be sohardon a feller. If you chust knowed——"
But she had gone far enough, and she would not let him finish. They had reached a saloon near to her new lodging-place, and she paused. There was, and she knew it, no word in his excuse that she would have credited. Nor did she mean, just yet, to let him see her hatred. In order that he might the better see it at a later moment, she wanted now to quiet his naturally ready fears. She had found that she could harass him, and that, for the present, was all that she needed to know.
"Never mind," she said, "I told you I wasn't goin' to rake up nothin', an' I mean to keep my word. Come on in here. This is a quiet place. You're goin' to buy me a drink, anyhow, just to show that we're still friends."
He brightened at this indicated avenue of escape.
"Surewe're still friends," he declared, "an' you can haf all you vant todrink, too."
She slipped her hand into his—she could do it, she had learned, without the dumb flesh seeming to shrink from that contact—and pressed it.
They went into the deserted "ladies' room" of the saloon to which she had referred, and sat down there, facing each other under a light turned kindly low.
"Vhiskey?" asked Max.
"Yes," said Mary.
"Two of 'em," ordered Max of the waiter that had answered his ring, "an' don'd make 'em sostingylike most you fellers ofer this vay."
The man brought the liquor, placed it before them, and went away.
"Vell," said Max, raising his glass, smiling his thin smile, and apparently forgetting that he had ever denied whiskey; "here ve are,ain'tit?"
If Mary was remembering another night and another drink she did not say so; instead, as Max tilted his sleek head far back between his shoulders and dropped the whiskey down his throat, her hand watched for the instant when his gray eyes were on the ceiling and that instant poured the liquor from her own glass to the floor. When her companion's head came forward her fingers, wrapped about the glass, were just withdrawing it from her lips.
"I can drink that better'n I used to," she said.
Max grinned again. So long as she did not upbraid him for his part in it, so long as she did not go into the details of its earlier stages, he had no objection to hearing of her past, was even languidly curious about it, and was certainly sorry that it had not brought her to more seeming prosperity.
"You sure didn't take that like you vasn'tusedvith it," he said.
"I'll take another just to show you how," she answered, and pressed the nearest button.
This time his eyes were on her and she had to drink. But she did not scruple: so long as she retained her head and Max lost his, the effect of the alcohol on her system concerned her but little.
They had a third drink, for "old time's sake," as Mary suggested, and this she succeeded in pouring down her dress-front. At the fourth, Max began to show signs of fear that he would have a drunken woman on his hands, but Mary's patent sobriety soon reassured him, and overcame his protests against a fifth by recalling his promise of liberality.
His cold eyes sparkled into a faint light. Little spots of red appeared in the olive of his cheeks. He felt the advance of the enemy in his veins and tried to go; but Mary began an imaginative narrative of her recent experiences and insisted on his listening. When he at last successfully interrupted that, she twitted him with being able to drink less than his pupils, and Max was once more forced to order. He was not drunk, or nearly drunk, but the fine edge of his discretion was dulled: he saw in the woman, who had now moved to his side, nothing that, whatever motives might be at work, could possibly harm him; he found something ludicrous in the situation. Her looks seemed better than they had appeared an hour earlier, and her tentative advances flattered him.
Mary, though she had drunk more than was good for her, had managed to spill enough liquor to retain all the sobriety she needed; but, when they at last rose, she swayed a little unsteadily.
"Now," she said, "you'll just buy me a half-pint for my head in the mornin', an' then you'll walk as far as my door."
Still enjoying the piquancy of the affair, he obeyed her. He even consented to come to her hall-bedroom with her—a room the exact reproduction of that which she had formerly rented farther uptown—and there, forgetful of the provision against the morning, they finished the half-pint.
At last he stood up from the bed on which he had been sitting while she, opposite, used the single chair.
"Vell," he said, grinning; "it's been good to see you again, und maybe I'll gome back some efenin'."
She rose before him. The light was at her back and her face resumed, as she stood there, some furtive traces of its earlier grace. The eyes seemed to soften, the cheeks were a natural pink beneath their coating of rouge, and her russet hair, curling about her face, relieved the harder outlines and cast a gentle shadow around the neck. She spread out her arms.