Front matter (continued 2)

Mary looked at her visitors without immediately replying. She had not, in fact, the remotest idea of what was the fitting word.

But the French girl was unruffled by this silence. She flung her head back upon a white neck and sent a slow column of blue smoke curling toward the ceiling.

"My name," she explained, with an odd clipping of her speech, "eet ees Celeste, an' my good frien' here," she continued with an easy gesture of the cigarette, "she ees Fritzie—chust a bar-bar-ous German."

Mary looked at her with a gaze large and listless.

"An' you' name?" pursued Celeste, "eet ees—what?"

Fritzie supplied the answer, speaking in a ponderous contralto.

"Her name is Mary," said she.

"Bien—a pretty name," Celeste rattled on, precisely as if her unwilling entertainer had made the response. "I like eet well; but"—and she studied with unobtrusive care the russet-framed, indignant face before her—"eet ees not so good as ees yourself. I t'ink—let me see—yaas: I t'ink I shall call you 'Violet.'—Violet, why you don't eat more een dees 'ouse?"

"I'm hardly ever hungry," said Mary.

"Not hongry?—Oh-h, but you mohst be hongry! Anyone so young mohst want to eat, and anyone so beautiful mohst eat so as not to loose the beauty.—Ees eet not so, Fritzie?"

The German girl smiled gently and nodded her blonde head.

"Ach, yes," she rumbled. "The liebchen!"

"No," insisted Mary. "I don't care about nothing. I have a headache all the time. I have one now."

Celeste jumped lightly to the floor: it was as if to uncoil her feet and to reach the door required but a single movement.

"Un moment!" she laughed. "I shall feex the mal de tête immediate!"

There was no time for remonstrance; the door closed upon her concluding word, and Mary was left there gazing into the stolid, sphinxlike face of the placidly smiling German. It was not a bad face, and soon Mary realized that it was a contented one.

Fritzie was returning her look with an equal curiosity.

"Are you vorried?" she finally inquired.

"No," lied Mary proudly.

"I dought you looked like vorried," the German continued. "Bud you should be nod. Dis iss a goot place. Dere are loads vorse blaces in New York dan dis: I know 'em."

She paused, but Mary's lips remained closed, her eyes fixed.

"You bed I know 'um!" Fritzie repeated. "Bud dis blace—vhy, ve haf de best meals, so goot nobody gould besser haf! I like dis blace."

A faint question shot into Mary's face. At once Fritzie answered it.

"Dat's righd. Listen: I gome over here two year ago in de steerage. Some of de vomen, men meet dem—oh, most all de nod-family vons—un' took dem to dese here intelligence office dat are only fakes, un' sold dem, vidout dere knowin' nussin' of it, fur ten un' fifteen dollar' each. Bud I vas careful. I get a real tshob.—Ach, himmel!"

She waved a broad palm in disgust.

"Id vas bad enough in de steerage mit all de sailor-mens kissin' you to-day un' kickin' you to-morrow; bud dat tshob of mine, dat vas de real limit! I gome over here because I vouldn't vork in de fields back home, bud in dat boarding-house vhere I get dat tshob, I get up at dree o'clock every mornin', because some of de mens vork in Jefferson Market, un' I haf to scrub, un' make de beds, un' help cook, un' vait on dable, un' vash dishes, un' sweep de whole house oud. Un' den till late at nighd I haf to help cook, un' vait on dable, un' vash dishes some more still. Vhenever I am sick, or late, or break von dish, or a boarder don' pay, I gets docked. Un' almost every veek I'm sick or late or break a dish or a boarder don' pay. My vages is d'ree dollar a veek, un' I never gets more as two-fifty—sometime, two—un' dat vill nod pay my clothes ad first, un' don' pay my doctor bills aftervard."

The story was told monotonously, without much show of emotion, but it was enough of itself to wring a word from the woman to whom it was addressed.

"You got sick?" asked Mary.

"Who vouldn't?" said Fritzie. "You bed I get sick, un' vhen I gome oud of de hospital, de young doctor—he'd been makin' grand lofe to me—he tell me I vas too nice a girl to vork my hands off fur nussin' a veek, un' he gif me his visitin' card vith a writin' on it to a voman he knowed, un' I quit un' vent dere."

She paused, but Mary was silent, and the German resumed:

"It vas a goot place, bud nod so goot as dis von. I stay a mont' till she move to Philadelphia. Den I vent to anozzer house, not so goot as dat first, fur two mont's till the voman die. Un' den, after some more, I gome here, pretty soon, to Miss Rose's. No"—she waved her thick hand toward the door through which Celeste had lately passed—"I'm nod like dat Frenchie. She's vhat Phil Beekman calls a 'gongenital,' vatever dat iss; I vork hard enough now, und I vanted to vork righd den; bud I tell you I could not stand it, dough I vas so strong. No, I'm glad I gome here."

She leaned back upon her elbow.

"Now, dis Celeste——" she began, but the French girl, just then entering, came with an air that was a sufficient explanation of her never complex temperament.

"Voilà!" she smiled, holding aloft a long glass filled by a dull green liquid. "Let the leetle girl tak some of thees wheech I meex for her."

Before she had well realized what she was doing, Mary had accepted the glass.

"What is it?" she asked weakly.

"Absinthe," replied Celeste.

"It smells like licorice," said Mary.

"Ah, but no; eet ees not that. You try thees, an' then you can eat."

"But I don't think I want to eat."

"Poof! That ees folly! See, now, I meex thees myself—I myself have frappé eet. Ees eet what you call polite that you say 'no' to me? Say, now: ees eet?"

Involuntarily Mary smiled. It was a rueful little smile, but it was a smile of exhausted consent.

"It won't hurt me?"

"Thees? You do not know eet. Eet ees the enemy of all the headache, of all the heartache, of all the bad nerve."

For answer Mary drained the glass, and when her visitors left her they turned no key upon their exit.

So, slowly, through all those early days, and through the days that immediately followed them, the spell of the situation worked. There was infamy, there was torture. The unending procession of visitors—clerks, drummers, car-conductors, teamsters, gamesters, thieves, brothers in the fraternity of lust, equals in the night of horror, mostly drunken, nearly all unclean of body and everyone filthy of mind—the green government note was their certificate of qualification, the money, however acquired, constituted their right to those counterfeits which the house of Rose Légère was maintained to sell. For that note, themselves the chattels of conditions, they might caress or beat; for that, they might take whatever their hearts demanded. Was the slave wounded? Was she ill? Was she heartbroken? She must smile; she must be one woman to all men. She must receive the blows with laughter, the ribaldry, the insults and the curses as wit. She must pass from this to that—and she must not care.

And yet Mary, who was Violet now, could do nothing but take as final the conclusion that Rose had drawn for her. To return home, even if she had the money, would be impossible, because to do so would be to court her father's anger and her mother's shame, with no hope of either pardon or justification. To go out into the cheerless street that sent its growling echoes up to her curtained window would be, she was assured, to deliver herself to arrest or starvation. She was ignorant and young. With no knowledge of the laws and the charities of the monster town, she saw only that the former, in uniform, was a back-door friend of her keepers, and she was told that the latter never helped before they first publicly burned upon their victims' brows the thenceforth ineradicable brand of infamy. Without there was, at the least, hunger, drudgery and disgrace; at the most, starvation, jail, death. Within, where fresh wounds meant but little, there obtained, under only a velvet-pawed tyranny, a tolerable democracy of disrepute, an equality of degradation, where food, at any rate, and shelter and raiment were certain, and where old scars and fresh bruises were hidden from the world: the price was no more than supine acquiescence.

Anything like financial independence was, of course, impossible: the slaves of Rose Légère were as much slaves as any mutilated black man of the Congo, or any toil-cramped white man in a factory. Their wages were paid to the supervisor, their few belongings secretly searched for gratuities, and though one-half of each payment was, theoretically, the portion of the employé, rent and board and lingerie demanded, and must needs secure, prices that left each woman hopelessly in debt to the mistress of the house.

With her senses in revolt, the mind and body of the newly-christened Violet came, by insidious degrees, nevertheless to approach some likeness to adaptability. Her material wants never went unsupplied, and such intelligence as she possessed began to swing toward that point of view to differ from which could bring nothing save serious discomfort. To the hope of Max's return she still, in her own heart, clung with that tenacity which only a woman can exert upon an acknowledged impossibility, but she felt even this hope shrink between her clutching fingers, and, doing her best to reason, she knew that, even should the miracle happen, Max had brought her and left her here with the intent that she should fulfill her economic destiny.

Too dull to see deeply into causes, she could only accept the slowly numbing hail of effects. Until a few days since, she had been a child, and, like most children, the individual at fault in every personal catastrophe. It was thus that she began by blaming herself for all that had now befallen her; it was only at moments of growth that she turned her anger first against her own parents, then against the active agent and finally against his principal, and it would be but after deeper vision and harder usage that she could see both herself and them, and the whole company that made them possible, as mere grist in the mill of a merciless machine.

And yet for a long time her one passion was the passion of release. Without clothes and money and protection she could understand no escape; but for these means she at last found courage to appeal to the one source from which she could conceive of their coming.

VI AN ANGEL UNAWARES

The man to whom she first spoke, in a stolen instant, descending the darkened stair, was a small shopkeeper, fat and pliable, beyond the age of violence, and, as he had just told her, a husband and the father of a girl of her own age.

"Listen," she said, with one trembling hand upon his shoulder, "I want you to do me a favor."

"Anything you say, Violet," he chuckled.

"Don't talk so loud, then. I—I want you to take me out of here."

The man looked at her, through the rosy twilight, in a flattered bewilderment.

"Like me as much as that, do you?" he sparred.

"You don't understand. Of course, I like you; but what I meant was——"

He interrupted her, his fat fingers complacently patting her cheek.

"It's not me that don't tumble to the facts," he said; "it's you. I told you I was a family man. I couldn't put you anywhere."

"I don't mean that. I mean——"

But again he cut in upon her labored explanation, his commercial mind traveling along lines in which it had been forced all his life to travel, and his pride entrenching itself behind the trivial rampart of his income.

"You girls!" he laughed, in palpable deception. "You all think I've got a lot of money. Why, there ain't no use thinkin' you can bleed me. I'm a business man, an' I do everything on a straight business basis, but I wouldn't rent a flat for the finest of you that ever walked Fourteenth Street."

Violet's answer was brief. That she should have given her confidence to such a beast, that such a beast should continue to thrive in the world that was closed to her, and that, her pitiable confidence once given, she should be so grossly misinterpreted—these things sent a red rage rushing to her now always incarnadined cheeks. She gave the shopkeeper a push that nearly sent him rolling to the foot of the stairs.

"Get away from me!" she whispered hoarsely. "Get away! I wouldn't have you for a gift!"

The man stumbled and gripped the rose-colored lamp upon the newel-post, which swayed, under his rocking weight, like a palm-tree in a storm. He gasped for breath, got it, and, shaking his fist upward through the shadows, began to bellow forth a storm of oaths that, for foulness, utterly outdid the ejaculations to which, from both sexes, Violet was already becoming accustomed.

"You come down here," he courageously shouted, "and I'll give you the worst beating you ever had in your life! Nice place, this is! I'll have it pinched—you see if I don't! You can't make an easy thing out o' me! You've robbed me, anyhow. You'll get what's comin' to you!"—And he ended with the single epithet to which those four walls were unaccustomed.

Rose ran out from the parlor.

"Shut up, you!" she commanded of the disturber, in a low tone that nevertheless compelled obedience. "What's the trouble, Violet?"

Violet leaned against the stair-wall, half-way up, her burning hands pressed to her burning face. She was mad with anger and shame, but she was also afraid.

"You heard him," she gasped.

"Yes," snapped the visitor, his voice uncontrollably resuming its former timbre, "and you heard me, too!"

The mistress is, of necessity, always, in a crisis, against the slave.

"Well," said Rose, "tell me what she done."

Violet, however, saw at once the necessity of changing the issue.

"He says he's been robbed!" she called down the stairs. And then she ran after her words, and stood under the lamp, facing them both, her arms extended, the flowing sleeves trembling with the emotion that they covered but could not conceal. "Search me!" she commanded. "If you think I took a cent of yours, search me!"

She was a vision that brought conviction with it.

Before the sputtering visitor could correct the situation, Rose had, perhaps against her will, been converted. She took the man's hat from the hall-rack at her side, put it on his head, opened the street-door, and gently propelled him through it.

"You're drunk," she said, "an' you'd better get out before I call the cop. There ain't no badger business in this house, an' don't you forget it!"

She shut the door, and turned calmly to Violet.

"How much did you get?" she asked.

"Why, Miss Rose, you know——"

"I mean what did you touch him for? You mustn't play that sort of game here: it gives the house a bad name. But just this once we'll divide up an' not say anything more about it."

Violet's eyes opened wide.

"I didn't steal a penny," she declared.

Rose regarded her with a softening countenance.

"Word of honor?" she asked.

"Word of honor," vowed Violet.

"All right, but even if you do touch them, you mustn't ever let them think you do. A man'll forgive you for hurtin' him anywhere but in his pocket-book.—You're all worked up, dearie. Come on out to the kitchen an' have a bottle of beer."

As they were pouring the drinks, a heavy foot sounded in the outside passageway and a careful four knocks followed upon the rear door.

"That's Larry," said Rose, and drew the bolt.

A policeman's hat was poked through the doorway, followed by a flushed, genial Irish face, and a tall, hulking body in regulation uniform.

"I'm terrible dry," grinned Larry.

"Then you've come to the right shop," was Rose's greeting. "We're just havin' a little drop ourselves. Larry, this is my new friend, Violet."

The policeman grinned again, and sat carefully upon the edge of a kitchen-chair, in evident fear that his bulk might prove too great for it.

"Glad to know you," he said.

"Larry's on this beat nights," Rose explained to Violet, "an' him an' the lieutenant look after us—don't you, Riley?"

"Well, what use is a frind if he don't take care of yez, Miss Rose? We do the bist we can."

"I know that.—What'll it be, Larry? We're takin' beer, but there's wine on the ice if you want it."

"I'll just have a small drap of liquor, ma'am, please," said Riley.

Rose poured and handed to him a glass of whiskey.

"When you came by," she inquired, "did you see a fat man throwin' fits in our gutter?"

"Why, I did not. Have ye been afther havin' a rumpus the night?"

"Oh, no—only that fat little fellow that keeps the jewelry-store around the corner. He was drunk, an' I threw him out. If he tries to get gay, let me know, will you?"

"Of course I'll let ye know—an' here's to your very good health, ma'am an' miss.—But you may rist aisy; that there won't be no throuble."

"I know that: he's too scared of his wife.—Have another, won't you?"

The officer rose.

"No, thank ye kindly," he said. "I wanted but the drap, ma'am."

"And how are Mrs. Riley and the children?"

Larry's face became a web of smiling wrinkles.

"Grand," he said; "the auld woman's grand—you ought to see her in the new silk dress I bought 'er the day—all grane wid fancy trimmin's from Six' Avenoo. An' the kiddies is thrivin'. Cecilia'll soon be havin' to go to work an' help the family funds, she's that sthrong and hearty, an' young Van Wyck is such a divil that the teacher throwed him out of school. He's licked all the b'ys in his class, an' I think he'll end as a champeen pug."

He went out, still smiling, and, as he did so, Violet saw Rose, after stooping hurriedly, place in his hands a yellow bill. As the door closed, there came into the younger woman's eyes the question that she would not have dared to ask.

"Yep," nodded Rose, "that's my week's pay for what they call protection."

"Isn't he afraid to take it?" Violet, thus encouraged, inquired.

"The man above him isn't afraid to take two-thirds of it," said Rose, "an' the best of it goes past him to the district boss—it's the regular system with the regular prices. Oh, no, he ain't afraid; an' if you ever tried to live on a copper's pay, you'd soon be afraid not to take it."

Violet, returning to the parlor, bit her lip: there was indeed small help to be had from the law.

Small help, either there or elsewhere. She turned, naturally, only to the seemingly more prosperous customers, but, even by them, she was met with smiling incredulity: her story was so hackneyed that it could not be true.

"It's all right enough to want to get out of here," said her sagest adviser, who at least paid her the rare compliment of credence; "but how are you going to live after you get out? You can't go home; you haven't got any trade; you can't cook; without a recommendation you can't get even a job at general housework or in a factory."

He was a quiet, middle-aged widower that said this, an infrequent visitor, a chief clerk in one of the departments of a large insurance company, with a reputation for liberal kindliness at Rose's and, in his own little world, a position of some influence.

"You get me out," said Violet, "an' I'll do the rest."

But here again the gate was barred against her. The clerk was burdened with a good name and a place of trust. He could risk neither the one nor the other. He was sorry, genuinely sorry—she saw that; but what could he do?

It was an evening or two later that she found her first pale ray of encouragement, and she found it in the person of Philip Beekman, that same young Beekman to whom Fritzie had casually referred.

Beekman described himself, with some accuracy, as a person of good family and bad morals. "We are getting so confounded poor," he used to say, "that I sometimes doubt the former; but I have constant visible evidence of the latter, and so I cling to that as the one sure thing in this uncertain life." Had he but seen the facts, he might well have considered his derelictions as the result of his parentage. At her divorce, his mother had been awarded the custody of her only child, and, now that she had remarried, Philip was forced to play that neither uncommon nor congenial rôle—the part of the young man with too little training to earn a living and too much ancestry to marry one.

"After all," he said, as he sat with Violet in the many-colored back parlor, a half-empty bottle between them, his usually pale face aglow, his gray eyes filmy, and his black hair tumbled by the constant passage through it of his long, nervous fingers—"after all, you see, you and I are in the same boat. You can't get out because, if you do, the sharks will eat you, and I daren't get out because I can't swim."

Always haunted by the fear that, in some manner, her true story might reach her own town and her own people, Violet had told him only as much as she dared, and what she had said had moved his impulsive generosity.

"But anyway," he insisted, "you can do one thing that I can't."

She clutched at the straw.

"What's that?" she asked.

"You can get help from shore."

"How do you mean?"

"I mean that if you'll write a letter home, I'll mail it."

She shook her head: the straw crumpled in her fingers.

"There's no use of that," she said.

"Of course there is. After all, your father's your father, you see, and I don't know a father that wouldn't help his daughter out of the sort of mess you've got into."

"I know one," said Violet, grimly.

"Not till you try him, you don't."

"Yes, I do. If you was in my place would your father——"

"Which father?" laughed Beekman. "My one won't have anything to do with me because I live with the other, and the other won't have anything to do with me because I'm the son of his predecessor.—You take my advice and write home."

"I'd never get an answer."

She spoke in an even tone, but there was no mistaking the tragedy that underlay it.

Beekman looked at her and blinked queerly. He brought his fist down smartly among the jangling glasses.

"It's a rotten shame!" he said. "A dirty, rotten shame! Why, don't you know that that yid who got you into this makes a business of such things? Don't you know there's a whole army of them that do? I wish to the Lord I could do something, but there isn't a policeman or a magistrate in the city who'd listen to me—they know too well where they get the jam for their bread and butter—and I can't get a job for even myself, let alone you!"

She had not, however, heard his last sentence. Her blue eyes wide, she was hanging on his reference to Max.

"A business?" she repeated. "Do you mean that men make money—that way?"

"Of course I do." The film passed suddenly from Beekman's eyes, leaving them alert with purpose. "Look here," he said, "there is one thing I can do, and I don't know anything that I'd enjoy more: you give me that little kyke's name, and I'll push his face out of the back of his head!"

Then there happened a strange thing. She had long guessed and now she knew, but guessing or knowing, she would not believe. As much for her own sanity as for Max's safety, she lied.

"The name he gave me," she said, "wasn't his right one. It wasn't even one he mostly used. And I never knew no other."

Beekman raised his hands in more than mock despair, and got up to go.

"Well," he declared, "I don't know what I can do for you. If I got into any scandal, it would punch the last hole in my meal-ticket."

Violet, who was becoming accustomed to such replies, smiled kindly.

"I don't want you to get into no trouble for me," she said.

"I know you don't, and I couldn't be any use if I did. But I'll promise you this: I'll keep my eyes open, and if anything does turn up, I'll be Johnny-on-the-spot, all right."

"Thank you," said Violet.

"And look here," pursued Beekman, "I know that it's all rot to expect you to walk out of here without friends or a job; I know that, unless you've got one or the other, you're just simply in jail here; but if I can't get you anything, there must be those who can. Why don't you talk to the coal-men, or the gas-inspectors, or—I tell you, I've seen that tow-headed Dutchman who leaves the beer here. He looks straight, and he stops at the door. Why don't you talk to him? He's the sort that would know of a job for—for——"

Beekman hesitated, blushing like a schoolboy.

"For my sort?" asked Violet. "Maybe he is. Thank you. Anyhow I'll see."

And she did see. When Beekman left her, pressing into her hand the last piece of money that he would have for a week, he gave her at the same time so much of hope. Those who seemed rich could not help her; she would appeal to those who were poor.

She was up early and in the kitchen the next morning at the hour when she knew the brewery-wagon would stop outside, and she sent the ebon Cassie on an errand to the corner pharmacy. The maid had scarcely closed the door before Violet was summoned to open it to the German of whom Beekman had spoken.

Philip had observed well. The brewery's driver, who stood whistling in the areaway, was a short, stocky man with the neck and arms of a gladiator and the round, smiling face of a child. His blue overalls and dark cloth cap accentuated the fairness of his hair, and his round inquiring eyes were alive with continual good-humor. He had just piled a half-dozen cases of beer beside the doorway.

Violet, in her crimson kimona, took from the table the money that had been left for him.

"Good-morning," she said as she handed him the bills.

He accepted the money with his left hand and, with his right, raised his cap from his clustering curls. His lips ceased whistling, half regretfully.

"Goot-mornin'," he replied, smiling.

"Won't you come in and have a drink?" asked Violet, adopting Rose's form of salutation.

"No, t'ank you," the German shook his head. "I neffer trinks nussing bud beer."

"Well," said Violet, "we have lots of that now."

"Und I neffer trink dot till tinner."

There was an awkward pause. The German, not knowing how to leave without seeming rudeness, was shifting his weight from one heavily shod foot to the other. The woman, uncertain how to say the words she wanted to say, remained with her hand upon the knob.

"You don't?" she awkwardly repeated.

"No, und so I t'ink—I t'ink I besser be goin'," he hurriedly concluded, and began to turn on his heel.

The necessity for quick action roused her.

"Wait," she said. And then, as he faced her again in mute wonder, she pressed another bill into his hand. "I want you to help me," she continued. "I want to get a job somewhere, and I don't want Miss Rose to know nothing about it."

He looked from the bill to her, still wondering.

"So-o?" he responded.

"Yes, I want work—some other kind of work—and I thought perhaps you might"—her voice faltered—"might know of some kind."

The German's mobile face underwent a quick change. First astonishment and then something not far removed from tears came into his childlike eyes. He crushed the bill in his big red fist.

"So-o?" he repeated.

"Yes, I—you understand that I must have friends or a job if I am to get away from here, and I thought you might know of something."

The German bobbed his curls.

"I know dot right vell," he said; "bud I don' know no tshob chust now."

Violet's face darkened.

"All right," she answered, "I only hoped maybe——"

"Look here, miss," the driver cut in with a note of ready feeling in his voice. "You mean all dot?"

"All what?"

"About geddin' ozzer—aboud a real tshob."

"If I had the clothes and a place I'd go this minute."

"Vell, den, listen. I've chust god a new blace; I'm goin' to be bar-tender ofer on Segond Avenue, bud I gan send back here if I hear anysing.—Your name?"

"Violet—just Miss Violet."

"All righd, Miss Violet, I know some more aboud dese blaces like dis dan you maybe t'ink, und I guess maybe I gan do somesing. Nex' Sunday I dake my girl to Coney, und den ve'll dalk sings ofer und ve'll see vhat Katie says."

In spite of the promised delay and the growing habit of doubt, Violet's face kindled.

"You're good," she said simply, "and I'll trust you."

"Oh, I make nussing," replied the German, smiling once more, "bud chust you vait: Katie gan fix it; she gan fix anysing."

Before Violet could reply, he had resumed his whistling and run down the alleyway; and she saw that he had tossed back her money on the topmost beercase.

VII HOLIDAY

That Sunday morning in his single, dark, narrow room, Hermann Hoffmann, the erstwhile driver of a brewery-wagon and the coming Second Avenue barkeeper, arose with the dawn, just as if it had been a workday morning, and set about his elaborate toilet, whistling.

To the casual eye there would have seemed little in his surroundings to inspire any lyric joy. The cell-like apartment, which was the only spot on earth that Hermann might call his home, was a back room on the top floor of a damp and gloomy tenement in a filthy court running off Houston Street near Avenue A. Only at noon did the pale sunlight strain into that court, crowded all morning with malarious dogs and dirty, toddling babies solemnly, but vainly, trying to learn how to play, and echoing all through the black night now to the curses of scarred, slinking tiger-cats, now to the staggering footsteps or the brawling oaths of drunkards reeling homeward through the evil-smelling darkness, and again to the piercing cry of a woman in mortal agony or mortal fear.

Robbins's Row was no place for a policeman after nightfall, and scarcely a safer place for a stranger by day. From its sagging file of dirty, paper-patched windows, more or less feminine shapes leaned out, calling gossip to their neighbors, and hauling at the pullied ropes that, crossing the street, spread above the pedestrians a tossing, parti-colored canopy of "wash." You entered it by climbing three rotting wooden steps, by stumbling through a wet hall, where a blue-burning gas-jet accentuated the sense of perpetual midnight, and you could reach the room of Hermann Hoffmann only by a perilous climb of six flights of stairs.

That room was as bare as any in the building. It looked out, by a single slit in the wall, upon a light-shaft, strangely misnamed. Its only furniture was a cot, a wooden-seated chair, a washstand, and, bearing comb and brushes and shaving-utensils, one of those pine bureaus the drawers of which may be opened in ten minutes, and closed, if you are lucky, in fifteen. Yet the note of the place was the note of order and of neatness; the bare floor was clean, and, against the fresh and brightly papered wall, there hung here a calico curtain that hid the tenant's wardrobe and there a single shelf bearing only, as if it were an altar consecrated to one holy object, a thumbed and dog's-eared copy of "Das Kapital."

Hermann plunged his ruddy face, whistling, into a bowl of water and drew it out, more ruddy and whistling still. Even the author of that portentous volume on the book-shelf used to sing "Strausbourg," and Hermann's single anthem was "Die Wacht Am Rhein."

Still pursuing that inspiring music, he turned to the bureau and began to shave the yellow down from his cheeks and chin. Thrust between the exaggerating mirror and its frame were two photographs—the one, a trifle faded, of a matronly, kindly woman of his own race, perhaps fifty years old, stiffly arrayed in a silk dress rigorously American, and the other, a new one, that of a young girl in a great hat and unmistakably Manhattan dress, a young girl with a pretty, piquant face of that distinctively American type—the Irish. Perhaps these photographs distracted the German's attention; perhaps it was only that no man living can successfully whistle and shave at one and the same time. At any rate, his hand shook, and the razor cut a light gash in his upper lip.

He flung the offending blade from him, and it struck the mirror, cracking the glass across one corner.

"Ach, Gott," he smiled, as he staunched the blood with a heavy pressure through a rough towel; and then, in the English that he used even in his soliloquies: "Dey say now dot means bad luck fer seven year. Lucky is't dot I am not suberstitious!"

And then, undisturbed, he quietly resumed his whistling, finished shaving, sleeked down his rebellious tow-colored curls, got into a newly pressed brown suit and yellow shirt, donned a high collar and salmon tie, and, setting a carefully brushed derby upon his head, descended to the narrow street, the strains of "Die Wacht Am Rhein" lingering behind him through the darkened hallway.

To accomplish the purpose of his early rising, he took the Third Avenue elevated to the Forty-second Street station. There he bought two bouquets of carnations—one pink and the other white—and boarded a suburban train, which bore him, at last, to one of those little stations that New York, which has so small time for remembrance, has selected for the hiding of its dead.

In the warm sunlight of the spring morning, Hermann picked his certain way among the green grass and the white-roofed habitations of the sleepers, until he came upon a little plot, by no means the cheapest or more obscure in the burying-ground, and there, his lips still pursed, but silent now, took off his shining derby and paused before the solitary white stone. With much that was unaffectedly reverent, he knelt, according to his weekly custom, and placed the white carnations on the grave, and with a great deal that was just as unaffectedly proud, he read, also according to that custom, the inscription cut upon the white stone that he had purchased with what, when he paid the bill, happened to be his last dollar:

Here In Peace Lies The Body Of WlLHELMINA HOFFMANN, Widow Of Ludwig Hoffmann, Of Andernach, Rhenish Prussia, Who Dep't'd This Life, Jan. 10, 1907. ——— "Wait thou, wait thou; soon thou shall rest also."

The inscription was in English, but when he had finished reading it, the dead woman's son said, under his breath, the Lord's Prayer in the language of Luther, as she had taught it him.

"She liked me to pray," he shamefacedly explained to the circumambient atmosphere, as if prayer in any tongue were a compromise with his principles. "Und vhile I'm aboud it, I mighd as vell use de old langwage. If the Herr Gott listens at all, He'd hear it some besser in de vay She said it."

And then he resumed his hat and his anthem, and returned to town.

Katie Flanagan was waiting for him as he came hurrying up the steps from the subway at Park Place—the piquant, pretty girl of the photograph, in black, because her parents had died not long since, but in black just as elaborate as her slender purse would permit, because she knew the full value of her raven hair and blossoming cheeks and tender eyes of Irish blue.

"Ach," gasped Hermann, "hof I kep' you a long time vaitin'?"

"Only about as long as you mostly do," she answered. Her voice was like her eyes, and she spoke with but the charming hint of a Galway brogue.

The German's cheeks burned with humiliation.

"I'm sorry," he apologized. "I god up early to be on dime, bud de train vas lade from the cem't'ry in."

She understood and smiled.

"It's only five minutes I've been here," she confessed.

"Und I brought you a few bosies, Katie. I d'ought maybe——"

"Oh!" she seized the carnations with a laugh of delight, and buried her nose in them. "It's good y'are to think of such things, Hermann—and a bad lad that y'are to spend the money so!"

They were making their way toward the Bridge, the sturdy Hoffmann shouldering a passage through the momentarily swelling Sunday morning crowd.

"Dot liddle makes nussing," he proudly protested. "To-morrow I begin ad my new tshob."

"But that," said Katie, "won't pay you hardly wan dollar a week more'n the brewery did. I dunno, but I think——"

There, however, her protest, for the moment, ended. They were caught, clinging together, in the whirlpool of the entrance; carried nearly off their feet, rushed by the ticket-window with a quick exchange of small coin, and, a few minutes later, were battling their way among the press into a waiting Coney Island train.

In the last charge, Hermann, his lips puckered in the battle-hymn, did heroic service. While Katie hung tightly to one arm, he used manfully the elbow of the other; pushed a guard to the right; shoved two cigarette-smoking youths to the left; wriggled through the already crowded platform and shot into one of the coveted "cross-seats." Much of the park would not be open for a month or more to come, but New York was already clamoring for its playground.

Katie, flushed and triumphant, sank beside him, and busied herself with the task of straightening her big black hat. Hermann watched her in frank admiration as she sat there, her arms raised to her head, in that pose which, of all others, is the most becoming to her sex.

"What are you lookin' at?" she archly wondered, casting a smiling, sidelong, blue glance at him.

But before her the strong man was a timid child.

"Ad de brettiest bicture in a whole vorld," he stammered.

Katie laughed again.

"Och," she said in gratified disapproval, "there sure must be a Castle Blarney somewhere on the Rhine. What favor are you wantin' to ask me now, I wonder."

Once he had started, Hermann was too dogged thus to be retarded.

"It's chust de same old fafor," he pleaded, as, with a great creaking of brakes, the train began to swing upon the Bridge. "Now I god my new tshob, Katie, there gan't for nod hafin' our veddin' be no good reason, gan dere?"

"There's one," she said, still delighting in her coquetry; "there's one reason."

"Vat is 't?"

"Its name is Father Kelly."

"Katie, you von't led dot gount!"

"I will so."

"Und I haf to gome into your church, und—und all dem d'ings?"

"You do that."

Hermann squirmed; but he knew of old that from this point she was neither to be persuaded nor driven. It was a discussion that they had held many a time before, and every time she would give him no answer to his suit until he should surrender in this particular. Now, however, he considered himself about to set foot upon the highroad to prosperity, and the prosperous can ill afford to skimp magnanimity.

"All righd," he at last somewhat ruefully conceded, though with certain mental reservations into which it seemed then unnecessary to enter: "I'm a strong von, und hof stood a lot a'ready, so I t'ink I gan stand dot too. I'll do it."

He took her by surprise.

"Promise?" she asked.

"Sure I bromise."

"No backin' out whatever happens?"

"No packin' oud."

"Well, God bless you then."

There was a catch in her voice as she said it. Into her lonely, hardworking life, this strong, soft-hearted, poor and cheerful German had brought about all the sunshine that she had latterly known, and she could think of nothing better than to give him the answer that he was so honestly anxious to hear. But, though he had become more and more to her from the first evening when he had seized her as she was falling from the platform of a surface-car that had started too quickly on its way, she had seen enough of the warfare with poverty in her own family to resolve that she would not marry until she could contribute her share to the wages of the resulting household, and now she had neither a position nor the immediate likelihood of obtaining one. It was hard, but she was used to hardship, and so, because she must not cry, she smiled.

Hermann tried to grasp her hand, but she easily eluded him.

"Den, vhen do ve say?" he eagerly demanded.

Much as it hurt her to hurt him, she laughed her answer:

"As soon as I get me fingers on a job that'll pay me six dollars a week, we'll have Father Kelly say the words for us."

"But Katie"—he used to say "Gatie" until she had teased him out of it—"you don' mean dot! You said—you dold me—you bromise——"

He floundered in the breakers of amazement. She turned her face away, and looked out of the window at the gigantic mockery of Liberty in the harbor; but she could not find it in her heart long to remain silent. She faced him once more.

"It's no use, Hermann," she said, her eyes very big and serious. "Here y'are goin' to Schleger's place with your first good chance at a way as'll lead you to somethin' worth workin' for—you said yourself it might end in a café o' your own—an' to get there you'll be needin' every blessed cent you can save. Do you think now I could look at meself in the glass mornin's if I married you an' kep' you down? No, thank God, I'm not so bad as that."

He sputtered toward a protest, but she waved him down.

"Now don't be tellin' me that two can live as cheap as one," she said. "I seen that pleasant lie nailed this many a year, an' I know more about housekeepin' in five minutes than you can learn in a lifetime. Things was plenty bad five years past, an' now they're worse yet. What rent is you know, an' what clothes is you can't even guess. Here's beefsteak at twenty-two cents the pound; veal up to thirty an' still goin' up. The papers make a fuss an' get the prices down three cents for three days, an' then the dealers put them up again when none's lookin'. An' as for eggs, you can pay seventy-five cents a dozen for them, winters, with the hour an' minute of the layin' stamped on them, if you're a millionaire, or you can get nine for a quarter if you hold your nose."

The hopeful Hermann shook his blonde head.

"But Katie," he said, "I don' gare if I neffer ged a gafé off my own. I don' vant a gafé: I vant you."

She smiled again.

"You flatter me by the choice," she said; "but if we can get along without the drink, we can't get along without a bite to eat now an' then. No, Hermann-boy, it's no use, I'm tellin' you. I seen it tried. Me father swang a pick and me mother took in washin'—when she could get it—an' even then it wouldn't work: the one would have starved to death if the third rail hadn't got him, an' poor mother killed herself tryin' to keep her an' me. It won't work, an' I know it."

While the train hurried above the dead level of Brooklyn houses, out through the suburban monstrosities and across the dunes, the optimist, still an optimist, renewed his endeavors to find the chance for lodging his own arguments; but all the while Katie continued to overwhelm him with a flow of errors. They had almost reached the sandy island before Hermann, still stubbornly hopeful, elected to drop the subject for the present, and took up, in its stead, the story of Violet.

He spoke simply, which is to say forcibly, and he had an understanding, and therefore sympathetic, audience. Katie's face immediately softened.

"The poor child!" she murmured. "An' don't I know what it is? I've seen them go under, here one an' there another, hungry or overworked, every mother's daughter of them. There was Molly Ryan, as good a girl as you'd find in a day's search of the parish, left alone with no one to put clothes on her back; an' pretty Agnes Donovan—out of work for four months—her as died in the City Hospital; an' Giulia Fortuni, whose father kept a fruit-stand by the Grand Street "L" station.—What can we do for her, Hermann-boy?"

"Dot's vat I vanted to ask you, Katie," said Hoffmann. "She has to hof friends und vork first of all."

"Friends she has right here; but work she must have whether or no. I begin me old search for meself in the mornin', an' I'll keep eye an' mouth ready to get a job for her."

Cynically hopeless and city-wise in regard to her own chances, Katie's Celtic soul warmed to something of Hermann's optimism in the cause of a sister. She began planning at once, and when the train drew up outside the tunnel-shed, she had the absent Violet established as a cloak-model in the big Lennox Department-Store, and engaged to marry a floor-walker.

And then Coney—Coney the sweetly reasonable in price and the extravagantly generous in provision—crowded out of her mind, for that day, all thoughts save the thought of itself.

A great many years ago—oh, a very great many years ago!—when you were a little boy, your father took you to the county-fair. You remember it, even yet, as a purple day in the glad calendar of your childhood: the blood cattle, the show of farm implements, the prize pumpkins, the side-shows with their fat ladies and skeleton gentlemen, and the suave individual that put a bean under a cup and then, for a dollar, showed your shrewd parent that it was under another. But above all you remember the crowd. Never before had you seen so many people in one place, never realized that there were so many people in the world; and even now, out of the past, you can hear an awed voice saying:

"There are five thousand persons here."

Well, back home, the county-fair, thank heaven, continues to grow. Cattle are sleeker and pumpkins larger; the fat ladies weigh more and the thin gentlemen less; the shell-game, in one form or another, aids the progress of agriculture by making five dollars grow where only one grew before. But, in the meantime, the ugly, delightful "amusement-park" has brought the county-fair to the city-limit, and nearly three hundred thousand persons go to Coney Island every day.

Early in the season though they were, Katie and Hermann no sooner stepped upon that Surf Avenue which is at once the heart and the aorta of the Island, than they felt, as there they always felt, that they had entered upon the Land of Carnival. The broad, but crowded, way was dancing with the noise of festival, with the clangor of brass bands, the cries of venders, the smell of the circus, the tang of the sea.

Here, from mixed drinks to mixed music, went not the thugs and blacklegs, the pallid men and the painted women that would have filled such a place had it been within the borough of Manhattan. In their stead here drove the cars of generally stolid people of business and leisure, and here, above all, walked the workers of the city, the weaker sex and the stronger, seeking holiday. The full-portion hat on the half-portion girl is as familiar to Surf Avenue as to the Waldorf palm-room; care is erased from the tablets of memory. On Coney there is no To-morrow.

The laughter of the hundreds of children rang out no more freely than did that of the thousands of their elders. Mothers with babies in their arms were young again. Stately blondes and languorous brunettes, gracefully seated on the wooden steeds of the score of merry-go-rounds, rode with a dignity unsurpassed in Hyde Park or the Bois, and never a cowboy at a round-up was more adventurous than the young East-Sider mounting a hired horse upon the Pony Track.

Every nook had something to sell, and Katie had her day's work in keeping Hermann from stopping at each booth. There were miles of scenic railways on all of which he wished to ride; there were scores of panorama that tempted him with pictures of every disaster from the San Francisco fire to the Messina earthquake. There were the familiar canes waiting to be caught with the familiar ring: there were the familiar chutes to be shot, and the familiar "galleries" where the rattle of rifles recalled the battle of the Yalu. Down on the beach an army was shouting in the surf, and on every hand along the jostling, good-natured street were peanuts and popcorn, "crispettes" and "hot dogs." Upon dozens of polished floors dancers were slowly revolving with a marvelous ability to distinguish between the time of their own orchestra and that of the band in the café opposite, and everywhere were picture machines and machines that sang.

Cheap it doubtless was, but cheap also in the sense of small cost. Except in the larger cafés, the ordinary drinks sold at only five cents the glass, and the glasses were not an insult to the drinkers' capacity. Hermann and Katie had their beer at one of the smaller places. They dined for twenty-five cents apiece, without tips, at the "Home-Made-Lunch-Room"; they were twirled and buffeted in a swiftly revolving car down a series of precipitous canvas chasms, paying five cents apiece for the privilege of the shaking-up that, at home, Hermann would have resented with a blow; and they chose the last seat in the last car of a steep gravity railway, where a man must hold himself aboard with one arm and his shrieking sweetheart aboard with the other.

It was all blatant, all tawdry, all the apotheosis of the ridiculous, all essentially America-at-play; but when, at night, in the electric-train shooting through the warm darkness, the pair returned citywards, it was toward their own hard-earned and with difficulty retained places of shelter that they were going, like children after a strenuous holiday of make-believe with school to begin upon the morrow; and if, in most of the seats, as in that occupied by Katie and Hermann, girls slept with their heads resting frankly upon sleeping masculine shoulders, it was but a rest before conventional partings at home-doorways, the play-day ended for the lonely couch, and the work-day soon to begin.

VIII MR. WESLEY DYKER

In that company of the ignoble army of martyrs over which circumstances had given Rose Légère command, there were five members. Besides Mary, who now was Violet, Celeste, whom ancient conditions had temperamentally predetermined for such service, and Fritzie, who had chosen a partly moral slavery as less onerous than a wholly economic servitude, there was the highly colored Englishwoman Evelyn, who regarded her present station as one of the descending steps inevitable for everyone that set foot upon the way they all were treading, and Wanda, a dark little Russian Jewess, who, as soon as she had landed at the South Ferry from Ellis Island, had fallen into the hands of the slave-traders, and had thenceforward persistently striven upward to the place she now inhabited.

For the maintenance of her authority upon these and their patrons, Rose, unlike some of her fellows, did not have to depend upon the assistance of any man quartered in the house. To the discipline of the inmates her system of charge for clothes, food, and shelter was admirably suited; for the regulation of the visitors the generally nearby person of big Larry Riley, the policeman, amply sufficed. One other outsider seemed, however, to have a regular connection with the establishment, and this person early excited Violet's curiosity.

Dressed in the extreme of fashion, as fashion is known from Fourteenth Street southward, his gray, almost white, suits always fresh from the pressing-iron, and his flowered tie and ever evident gay silk handkerchief always glaringly new, this dapper, dark young man was unmistakably Neapolitan. His glossy black hair clustered tight over his forehead; his brown skin shone as if rubbed with oil; his eyes danced like merry, but sinister, bits of coal, and his too red lips were continuously, loosely, patterned to a smile that was more nearly contemptuous than good-humored.

For at least a part of every evening this Italian, who always entered the house from the rear and without the formality of knocking, sat in the kitchen, drinking his beer with infinite leisure and, in the intervals of her discussions in the parlor, condescended to talk, lazily, with Rose.

"Who is he?" asked Violet, on what was perhaps the fifth of his visits that she had happened to observe.

Celeste, to whom the question had been addressed, shrugged her smooth shoulders.

"He ees Angel," she answered.

"He don't look like one."

"No, not mooch, but hees name, eet ees that: Rafael Angelelli. Eef he had the moostache, he would be almost 'andsome."

"Rose acts like she thought a good deal of him as he is."

"But why not?"—Celeste raised her heavy brows. "'e ees 'er sweed'eart."

"He is?" repeated Violet, who could not yet understand the masculine lover that would batten upon his conquest. "I notice he pretty nearly lives here, an' he never pays out a cent, an' never seems to work at anything, an' he always wears good clothes."

"My child, truly! That is the reason that I have tol' you: 'e ees 'er sweed'eart."

"Well, it's queer," said Violet, remembering another caller to whom, though he was a less frequent visitor, Rose was equally attentive. "I don't think he's half as nice as that fellow who comes here in a taxi—the one that always wears a dress-suit an' sits in the back parlor. He's a swell."

But at this Celeste grew enigmatic.

"Oh," she said, "that ees deeferent"—and would say no more.

Nevertheless, it happened, not long afterward, when the black Cassie was absent on her "evening out," that Violet, descending the back stair in unshod feet to steal from the ice-chest—as was her companions' custom—a quiet bottle of the beer that she had come to like, was brought to a palpitating stop by the sound, just then, of Rose's and Angel's voices from the kitchen but a few steps below her. The pair were plainly engaged in an important conversation, the woman hurried and frightened, the man cold and obdurate.

"Naw," said the Neapolitan; "I maka naw move out o' deesa house."

"But he's coming in now, I tell you," Rose almost supplicated. "He'll be in the back-parlor in half a minute, an' I've got to go in an' talk to him."

"Olla righta; you go; I go alonga you."

"You can't do that; you know you can't. You know how things are without my tellin' you. What makes you so stubborn all of a sudden?"

"I don' lika dees Meesta Wesley Dyker."

"That's no reason why you should double-cross me."

"'E's too mucha de fina gentleman."

"I don't care what he is; you ought to know what I am. Do you want to tear up your own meal-ticket and throw down your easy money?"

"Easy mon'? You maka de joke!"

The woman's voice noticeably changed.

"Do you mean you want some more coin?" she asked.

The Italian did not answer.

"Because I won't give it to you," Rose continued, anger darting into her still cautiously lowered voice. "I know what you're doing with it. I know you had a girl from a department store out at shows twice last week, an' the second time she had a new dress on."

Somewhere in the front of the house a door closed heavily.

"'E's comin'," the Italian coolly commented. "Do you wanta that I go along in with you?"

As quickly as it had entered, all the anger fled from Rose's voice, and Violet, accustomed to it in command or at satisfied ease, was amazed now to hear it swaying between terror and genuine affection.

"I didn't mean it!" Rose pleaded. "I didn't believe it when I heard it an' I don't believe it now, I know how much it costs a fellow to live. Here's another ten-spot. I—I—you know how I hate Dyker, and Angel, you know that I love you!"

The listener heard Angelelli rise and heard even his voice soften, though probably less with affection than with gratification.

"Now you talka lika de person witha gooda sense," he said. "Don' you listen to de beega lie no more. I lika you—nobody but only you. You are de gooda girl."

There was a whispered word more, and then the kitchen door was softly shut and Violet heard Rose, going into the next room, welcome that Wesley Dyker who, Violet had, to Celeste, so favorably compared with Angel.

The woman on the stairs hesitated. She wanted to pursue her eavesdropping, and she knew that she could regain her room, should the doorbell ring, before she was likely to be missed; but she was afraid that, in the maid's absence, Rose might return to the kitchen for a bottle of wine and discover her. Accordingly she waited the few minutes that were required for the first of such errands, and, those over, crept forward to the lighted keyhole, ready to retreat at the first intimation of danger.

She gave her eye precedence over her ear, and, as it chanced that Dyker was sitting directly in the limited shaft of her vision, she was enabled to get what was her first careful view of him.

A man but little beyond thirty, Wesley Dyker's face, which might once well have been handsome, was beginning to show that flaccid whiteness which must later light to red and glow to purple. What his mouth might have told, a crisp, short, brown mustache concealed, but the regularity of his other features lost much of its effect because of eyes that, though large and steel gray, were heavy-lidded and calculating. Nevertheless, Violet's estimate of the man was not without justification. He spoke easily and well in the voice of education; his excellently made evening clothes displayed a figure that had not yet lost its admirable lines, and even the face—to one that either had known it during its gradual changes, or to one that lacked a fund of experience for purposes of comparison—was not wanting in attraction.

To the sturdy Rose, whose hand he held and who was looking at him with what she patently believed to be a tender expression, he was speaking with a certain formal politeness that was novel in the ears of the listener.

"You think you can get it?" Rose was asking.

"I think that I have something more than a fighting chance," replied Dyker.

"What does O'Malley say?"

"He is at least as liberal in his promise to me as he is in his promise to the other man."

"And the big chief doesn't yip?"

"My dear Rose, you should know, by this time, enough of New York politics to realize that the first qualification of a big boss is to hold his tongue, and that the present incumbent, whatever his other shortcomings, can always keep quiet as long as he has no pen in his hand."

Rose freed her hand to pour the wine.

"May I smoke?" asked Dyker.

"You always ask me that, and you always know you can."

He bowed and, drawing a cigarette from a plain gun-metal case, lighted it.

"Of course," he pursued, "I expect to win—I always expect to win, because failure may fight its way to a perch on any man's banner, but it's sure to lodge on the standard of the man that sits and waits for it. But I can't be sure of O'Malley."

"I guess whatever headquarters orders will go with him, all right."

"On the surface, perhaps; but, if he wants to, he can have his own candidate run on an independent ticket, and then he can quietly knife me at the polls."

"Would he have the nerve?"

"It is precisely what he did election before last. I am sure of that, and yet nobody has ever been able to prove it. That is where I look for your help."

Rose took his hand again, and pressed it reassuringly.

"I always take care of my friends," she smiled, "and you sure have been good to me. Where do I come in on this game?"

"Just yet you don't have to come in at all. It may be that everything will be honest and above-board—I trust it will—and in that case you need not disturb yourself."

"But if it ain't?"

"If it isn't,"—he looked at her kindly, but keenly, from under his heavy lids—"I shall want you to let me know just as soon as O'Malley begins to make preparations for registering voters from this house."

Rose bent forward and kissed him lightly on his flaccid cheek.

"That's easy," she laughed.

"Perhaps, but if you have to go so far at first, you will have to go farther afterward."

"An' now?"

"Just now I want you to keep your ears open for gossip. You are in a position to hear a lot: in this house men talk that are dumb outside."

"Who are you thinkin' of?"

"Several people, friends of O'Malley's. There's one cheap little camp-follower who, I am told, gets around here rather frequently. I don't suppose that he's of enough importance to know much, but he would be worth watching."

"What's his name?"

Dyker filled Rose's glass, and poured more wine for himself.

"Angelelli," he answered.

From the darkened kitchen, Violet, her eye now fast to the keyhole, drew a short breath, and watched Rose as the sophisticated spectator watches an emotional actress when she approaches her "big scene." But Rose, still the primitive Teuton of the brewery-calendar, never quavered.

"Rafael Angelelli?" she inquired.

"I think so. He is a little Italian loafer with no work and plenty of money. You know him, of course?"

"Sure I know him. He's in an' out of here all the time. We call him 'Angel'."

"Hum. Well, there are angels and angels, so that name may fit him as well as any other. There may be nothing to it, but he does hang about O'Malley a good deal, and it might be worth your while to find out what, if anything, he knows."

"That's easy," purred Rose. "Here's success."

The pair clinked their glasses, and drained them.

"And—Rose?" began Dyker.

"Yes?"

"Neither this little fellow nor any of his crowd knows about—us?"

Rose's placid smile was eminently convincing.

"I guess I know my business," she said.

"I dare say you do. Only don't let him know that you know mine."

"Trust me for that, Wes' dear."

"Because, if O'Malley could get hold of it, he would have a rather formidable weapon."

"He doesn't know I ever set my lamps on you."

"Good," said Dyker; "and he mustn't know it for a good many months to come. Now, then, let's have just one pint more between us—only a pint—my dear—and——"

But the woman at the keyhole waited to hear no more.

IX THE COURT OF A MERCHANT-PRINCE

When that injudicious grasping of the third-rail had snuffed out the low, but stubborn, flame that a foreman had known as "Number 12," and a few score of human beings had called Michael Flanagan, his wife, Bridget, had looked up from her washtub long enough to refuse the offer of a hundred dollars, made by the company's claim-adjuster as full payment for whatever inconvenience she might have been occasioned by her husband's demise. One of those very modern young lawyers, whose livelihood depends upon their study of the newspapers, and the speed of their feet, had arrived at the Flanagan tenement ahead of the adjuster. He had accepted a contingent fee of ten dollars, and thereafter, being defeated by the company's expert attorneys in a lower court, refused, as usual, to appeal unless the widow handed him a further amount of money that was wholly beyond her reach. So Irish-eyed Katie was put to work, as she should in any case have been put, and Mrs. Flanagan went on with her washing.

The girl's first position was in a second-hand clothing shop on Sixth Avenue, where she went to work at eight in the morning and quit at half-past ten at night. The stock-in-trade of this place was largely revived ball-gowns and opera cloaks, bought, for the most part, from women of so much means as to pretend, at least, that they never wore the same gown twice, and yet of too much thrift to give their discarded clothes to charity. Its patrons were persons that the original wearers of the gowns would have blushed to meet. And its proprietress was a little lynx-eyed, hook-nosed person whose sole object in life was to induce the former class to sell for less than they had intended and to persuade the latter class to buy for more than they could afford.

The virtue of this method she impressed, by precept and example, upon her six girl-clerks, and she raised their profits as they raised their prices of sale. She told, with a fine pride, how she had once so conducted a negotiation that a Riverside Drive husband had paid her nearly as much for a dress that he was buying for a Forty-seventh Street acquaintance as he had first paid for the same dress when it was made for his wife.

But, commissions to the contrary notwithstanding, neither Katie nor her companions could earn anything beyond a bare living wage. The lure of clothes was always before them; their work was the handling and the praising of beautiful fabrics beautifully arranged. They were told that they might themselves buy of these at what the proprietress called a mere nothing above the cost price, but what was really a considerable increase over it; they wanted to look their best among their friends, and their employer insisted that they look their best to her patrons; there was not one of the half-dozen clerks that was not continually from fifteen to a hundred dollars in her mistress's debt.

That Katie, like many another making the same fight, escaped further contamination, that the contrast between the oppression of the hook-nosed owner on the one hand and the apparent ease and luxury of her customers on the other, did not tempt her,—for opportunities were plenty,—from the station of clerk to purchaser, was due in part to her own sturdy character and to the accident of her own Celtic temper. Other girls there were who were not so destined, but Mrs. Flanagan's weary feet one day refused to support their possessor, and Katie, knowing well the need of ready money for the doctor and the druggist, neglected to purchase, even on credit, an expensive black walking-suit that was repeatedly called to her attention.

"Say, you'd look just grand in this," said the psittacidic proprietress, Mrs. Binks.

She held the dress extended, putting its best points to the light. And all the other clerks echoed:

"You'd look just grand in it, Miss Flanagan!"

"I would that," replied Katie, who was as taciturn to her employer as she was loquacious to everybody else.

"Why don't you take it?" asked Mrs. Binks.

"I don't just like it," lied Katie.

Mrs. Binks blinked her bead-like eyes. That the girl's reply could be true was inconceivable.

"Try it on," she suggested.

"Where's the use? I don't want it."

"Oh, try it on anyway."

"I'll be too busy, Mrs. Binks. The customers 're startin' to pour in this very minute."

"Then try it on at your lunch time. I'll leave it handy here, over this chair."

She did leave it there all day long. Katie, whose one dress was now, in spite of endless feminine make-shifts, beginning to show wear, had to go through her task with the baited hook constantly dangling before her. Nevertheless, when the long-delayed closing hour arrived, the suit was just where Mrs. Binks had left it. Katie carefully abstained from touching it; she would not even put it away.

"What's this?" asked the mildly surprised owner, as she stumbled over the garment. "I declare it's that handsome walking-suit I wanted you to have, Miss Flanagan."

Katie turned and regarded the neglected garment precisely as Mrs. Binks was regarding it.

"Well, well," she said, "and is it, now?"

Her mistress looked at her, again blinking suspiciously.

"Did you try it on?" she demanded.

"No."

"Why not?"

"I don't think I want it."

"It's a fine suit."

"It's grand."

"But you don't want it?"

"I don't think I do."

"I told you that you could have it for a third off."

"I know you did that, Mrs. Binks, and it's thank you I do for your kindness."

"Hum—hum. I'll take off a dollar more—for you."

"Thank you, no, Mrs. Binks. Good-night, Mrs. Binks."

This sort of thing went on, with variations, for three days, at the end of which time Mrs. Binks, as she would have phrased the occurrence, "came right out with it"; and for this ceremony she chose that morning hour when the other girls in the shop had the greatest amount of leisure to observe what happened.

"Miss Flanagan," said she, marching up to the thoroughly prepared Katie, and peering hard into the serene Irish eyes of her selected victim, "I like my clerks to look well."

"So I've been noticin'," said Katie.

"An' I don't like to speak about it when they don't," continued Mrs. Binks.

"You're just that tender-hearted!"

"But if you girls don't wear good clothes, my customers'll think I don't treat you right."

"How could they now, Mrs. Binks?"

"And," concluded Mrs. Binks, overlooking these interruptions in view of the crushing climax she was approaching, "as you've made up your mind not to take the hints I've been givin' you, or the fine offers I've made you, I've got to say it plainly that you're looking too shabby to work any more for me."

Katie smiled her warmest smile.

"Mrs. Binks," she replied, resorting again to prevarication, and presenting the greedily seized money that she still owed her employer, "I'd begun to be afraid that maybe them was your feelin's, an' so yesterd'y at lunch time I bought me the exact duplicate of that walking-suit you've been tryin' to thrust upon me—only I got it next door an' for half your price."

Saying this she had walked to the shallow closet in the fitting-room, taken down her hat and coat, put them on, sung "Good-by" to her consternated fellow-workers, and strolled away forever from that place of employment. She went smiling, but, instead of the curt word that she generally employed, she administered a hand-slap with her open palm to a stranger that accosted her on her journey homeward.

She got work, after some searching, in a candy shop on Eighth Street, but this she had to relinquish when her mother's speedy illness developed into a brief and fatal disease. It was not until the last nursing, relieved by Hermann's assistance, and the funeral were over, that she could again think of labor, and then it was only to get, in a Fourth Street necktie factory, a small position that she lost because she had the effrontery to resent the rather frank overtures of the foreman.

Now, although she had told her cheerful lover nothing about it, she had come to the last ditch. She had been deceived by advertisements, cheated by employment agencies, denied work by the superintendents of scores of shops and manufactories. She was not a skilled laborer, and she had, at first, nothing in the matter of recommendation; she belonged to no trade union; the rent for her little room was dangerously overdue; so, also, were the bills of the baker and the milk dealer upon whom alone she was depending for food; all that she could pledge was in pawn, and, with the soles of her shoes worn through almost to her feet, the elaborate mourning costume that she had been unable to resist was her only badge of material prosperity.

Two avenues of escape were open, were even persistently presented, yet she would regard neither. To take what Hermann pleaded with her to accept, though her hungry heart and her underfed body cried out for it, would have been, she felt well assured, unfairly to handicap her best friend, and, as for turning into that other way—a way into which the streets on every hand seemed so easily to open, she was too wise to consider.

"No thanks," she answered in her soul, as she walked by the leering satyrs, with her black head erect and her lips compressed—"not yet, if you please: not yet, nor never, I think, for starvin' seems some easier and a deal quicker, too."

She had to repeat the words pretty often, for they had come to be a sort of incantation, almost a pious ejaculation, against the enemy, and, as her poverty grew and her chances decreased in inverse ratio, the enemy, like vultures flocking to the fatally wounded, seemed startlingly to increase in force. At first it was a well-dressed corps strayed from Broadway or the Avenue; then it was the bank-clerk hurrying to work and the master mechanic hurrying from it; but finally, so plain are the signs of distress shown upon our faces by the selves that are besieged, it had become the professionally employing, professedly unemployed.

Yet at every dawn she renewed her quest, with a glass of blue milk and a bite of bread for breakfast. Every day and all day she tramped the long, aching streets. And every night, despairing but resolute, she came home for her supper of bread and milk and for the sleep of the hungry and distressed.

It was now a Thursday morning. The milkman had pounded at her door and, receiving no answer, had left no milk. Still gnawing her crust, Katie slunk out of the tenement, and, at the step, was waylaid by the rent-collector, a little man with a sharp, white face that told plainly of his own struggle. He blocked the exit.

"Good-day to you, Miss Flanagan," he said, touching his dirty cap.

"Good-mornin', Mr. Woods," she answered, aware that the hour for the last engagement was approaching.

The man was one whose business forced him to mince nothing.

"I was comin' up to git yer rent," he continued. "It's three weeks overdue."

"I'm afraid I'll have to be askin' you to let it run a bit longer," said Katie, and her voice, in spite of all resolution, trembled.

"But I've been an' done that twice fer you, Miss Flanagan. The boss is after me as hard as I'm after you—an' harder."

"I know it. I—you can't stand him off another week, Mr. Woods?"

"Nix on the stand-off, miss."

"You see, I'm—I'm out of a job."

"I know that, but then you've been out o' one fer a good while now."

"Yes, only I rather expect—indeed, I've been promised one beginnin' to-morrow."

The little man coughed behind a dirty hand.

"That's Friday?" he asked.

"It is that."

"Well, ain't you got your dates mixed? You told me last week you had a job promised for that Friday."

Katie surprised even herself: she laughed.

"So I did!" she said. "An' of course I was lyin' an' of course you knowed it. Oh, well, Woods, man, hold 'em off for forty-eight hours, an' if I don't get work then, I'll—well, I won't bother you no more."

In the shadowy hallway, she felt his eyes studying her less with evil than with wonder.

"There ain't many girls with your looks, Miss Flanagan, as'd be out of a job as long as you've been."

Katie shrugged her shoulders: she was beyond resentment.

"The more pity to 'em," she said.

"Not many," repeated Mr. Woods.

There was an awkward silence. The collector paused because he wanted her fully to weigh an implication that he honestly considered to contain sound advice, and Katie refrained from further comment for the excellent reason that she had nothing to say. It was Woods that at last took up the broken thread.

"I'll tell you what I'll do, Miss Flanagan," he not unkindly concluded; "I'll hold 'em off till to-morrow evenin', an' if by then you can pay me a chunk on account, it'll be all right; if you can't——"

He stood aside, and Katie clapped him warmly on the shoulder.

"You're doin' your best, Woods," she said, "an' I thank you for it. I'll get the job someways, but not the way you think, an'—an' I thank you."

Only half-way to the corner she met the girl that lived across the hall from her, Carrie Berkowicz, a homely, round-cheeked, brown-haired Lithuanian Jewess, who worked in a shirtwaist factory on Tenth Street.

"Say, Katie"—Carrie prided herself on her colloquial English, as she learned it in the night-classes in the Rand School—"were you still looking for a job?"

Katie nodded.

"Well, say, I just this minute passed Emma Schrem, an' she says Cora Costigan is quitting her job at the Lennox store to-day to be married to-morrow. Why don't you pull up there and try for it?"

Try for it? Katie could scarcely stop to thank her rescuer before she had turned northward. There was no longer left her even the five cents necessary for carfare, and, though she was faint with hunger and shaking with fear lest her tardiness should lose her this slim opportunity, she was forced to walk. Facing a fine rain blown in from the Sound, she walked up Second Avenue, and finally, turning westward to the shopping quarter now crowded with salesgirls on their hurried way to work, she entered, by the dark employés' door, the large department-store of Joshua N. Lennox, merchant and philanthropist.

A dozen quick inquiries rushed her, wet and weary, but flushed by her walk and radiant with the excitement of the race, into the presence of the frock-coated, pale-faced, suave-mouthed Mr. Porter, the tall, thin man, with the precision of a surgeon and the gravity of a Sunday-school superintendent, to whose attention, it appeared, such pleas as hers must be brought. Mr. Porter, who had gray side-whiskers, which he stroked with white hands, listened in judicial calm to what she had to say.

"Just fill out this application-blank," he remarked as, breathless, Katie ended her little speech.

They were in a dim, bare office under the street, the man at a roll-top desk lighted by a green-shaded incandescent lamp, the girl standing beside him. Mr. Porter indicated a writing-shelf along the opposite wall, where Katie found a pile of the blanks, and pen and ink. While she struggled with the task assigned her, Mr. Porter verified, by brief, sharp inquiries through a telephone, her statement of the approaching marriage of Miss Cora Costigan.

Katie, meanwhile, was giving her age, her parentage, her birthplace, the name of the firm that had last employed her—she mentioned the candy-shop for that,—was cheerfully agreeing to join the "Employés' Mutual Benefit Association," and was putting a "Yes," which she intended promptly to forget, to the question that asked her to become a spy on her co-workers: "If you saw a fellow-employé doing anything detrimental to the interests of the firm, would you consider it your duty to report the same?" It was only at one of the last questions that she hesitated.

"Please what does that mean?" she asked.

Mr. Porter deigned to walk across the room and, close to her shoulder, examined the question. It was the simple one: "Do you live with your parents?"

"That," said Mr. Porter, "is inserted because the firm wishes to have only nice girls here, and those with good home influences are considered—most trustworthy."

Mr. Porter had the type of emotionless eyes that can say one sort of thing far better than the eyes of more temperamental people, and he now met Katie's steady gaze with a stare of considerable significance.

Katie was rather sure that she understood.

"So that," she said, "if I didn't live with my people, I couldn't have the job?"

"So that," Mr. Porter corrected, "if a girl does get a position and lives with her family, she will be better cared for, and we will know that she is safe at home evenings."

Katie hesitated no longer. She took the pen and, opposite the query, wrote a quick "Yes." To be sure she was, on that account, obliged to invent the kind of work done by her father and the amount of the family wage; but she so needed the position that her active wit at once supplied the answers. More or less truthfully, she put a word in reply to the remaining questions, signed her name, and wrote her address.

Mr. Porter took the paper in his white fingers, read it slowly, folded it, indorsed it with several hieroglyphics, and placed it in a pigeon-hole.

"I am filing this with our other applications," he said. "As soon as your name is reached, I will see that you are notified."

Katie's jaw dropped.

"But I thought," she began, "I thought I was to get the job now. I—isn't Cora leavin', thin, after all?"

"Miss Costigan is leaving us, I understand," said Mr. Porter, stroking his whiskers; "but there are others—nearly a hundred—on the list ahead of you."

Katie was hungry, and hunger finds it hard to think of justice. She had borne all that she could bear. The waiting, the walking, the hope and the hopelessness had gnawed the string of her courage. Something snapped inside of her, and she began to sob with Irish unrestraint.

Mr. Porter was embarrassed. He frequently had to deal harshly with other employés of his philanthropic employer—it was, in fact, upon the performance of such duties that his living almost depended—but he did not like to have tears shed in his office: it did not look well for the reputation of the establishment.

"My dear Miss—Miss Flanagan," said he, first consulting the application-blank for the forgotten name, and putting one of his white hands toward the face now hidden in a crumpled handkerchief.

"You mustn't—really, you must not!"

"But everything depends on me gettin' this job!" sobbed Katie in an Irish wail. "The rent's due; me family's all sick; the milkman won't leave no more milk, an' I've eaten nothin' for Heaven knows how long!"

In a rush of words her story, including that of her resurrected father, leaped from her. What effect it would have had upon Mr. Porter had it been calmly told is beyond guessing; but it was told by no means calmly, and Katie's voice rose to a pitch that forced him to surrender out of mere fear of a prolonged scene. Grudgingly, but unconditionally, he laid down his arms. He took the telephone and called again Miss Isaacs, the buyer of the women's hosiery department, which Miss Costigan was to leave on the following day, told as much of Katie's story as he thought necessary, and obtained consent to a trial of the girl. He informed Katie that she might take, on the next morning, the place to be vacated by Miss Costigan, but he took care to impress upon her mind the fact that he was doing her an exceptional favor, which she was not to mention to her friends, who might try to profit by her unusual experience.

Katie was on the point of calling all the saints to bless him when she bethought her of a practical inquiry theretofore, in her eagerness to secure any sort of work, neglected.

"An' what's the pay?" she inquired.

"You will receive," replied Mr. Porter in the tones in which his employer announced the gift of a small fortune to a large college, "four dollars and fifty cents a week."

Katie forgot the saints.

"Four—" she began. "But, Mr. Porter," she concluded, "will you be tellin' me how I'm to be livin' on all that?"

Mr. Porter's calm eyes came again into significant play.

"You have said in your application, you may recall," he dryly remarked, as he reached for that document, "you have said that you lived with your father."

For a moment her glance probed his.

"But for all that," she said, "I have to support meself entirely."

Mr. Porter was still looking at her with his emotionless, appraising gaze. He saw a girl with pretty, piquant features, with glossy black hair, with cheeks that bloomed even in privation and blue eyes that were beautiful even in tears.

"Miss Flanagan," said he, "most of the girls that start at these wages in department-stores are partly supported by their family or have some friend to help them out."

Katie flushed, but she kept her outward calm.

"An' what if they haven't got a friend?" she inquired.

Porter's cold eye never wavered.

"They find one," he said; "and I may add, Miss Flanagan, that you should experience no difficulty in that direction."

Poverty will do much for most of us. For Katie it succeeded in curbing a temper that, in better times, was never docile. Beggars, she reflected, cannot afford to look too closely into the source or significance of the alms they have asked. She swallowed her wrath.

"Will you advance one week's salary now?" she asked.

Mr. Porter was distinctly surprised.

"I—why, certainly I won't!" he stammered.

"Why not?"

"But, my dear Miss Flanagan, I have nothing to do with the payment of the salaries. Besides, this firm doesn't know you; it does not even know that you will come to-morrow; it does not know that, if you do come, you will remain."

Katie smiled insidiously, and Katie smiling through her tear-curled lashes was insidious indeed.

"Och, now, Mr. Porter," she protested. "That's all well enough for the green girls; but you an' I know that you're the boss in matters of this sort. Lend me two an' a quarter."

Mr. Porter, pleased in spite of himself by her flattery, protested, but Katie remained unconvinced. She declared that she knew he was the real authority and that she could not bear to hear him underestimate himself. And the upshot of the discussion was that, though Mr. Porter could, in his official capacity, do nothing so unbusinesslike as to make her an advance, he would, personally, be glad to oblige her with a dollar and a half, and oblige her, adding a fatherly pat to her pink cheek, he ultimately did.

"Thanks," Katie responded as she took the money, and turned to go. "I'll report to-morrow, then, at a quarter of eight, Mr. Porter."

"At quarter to eight," repeated Mr. Porter, slowly closing the door behind her.

But, out in the wet street, Katie was saying what she had refrained from saying in the darkened office.

"An' as for the pay," she concluded, "I can't buy no automobiles with me loose change; but I think you'll find, you limb of Satan, that I can keep body an' soul together without a friend in the wor'rld!"

X ANOTHER SPHERE

That same evening, his crisp brown mustache hiding the meaning of his mouth, and his drooping lids concealing the purpose of his steel-gray eyes, Wesley Dyker, from the rooms he had rented in an East Side Assembly district, took a cab northwestward through the rain to Riverside Drive. He was dressed precisely as he dressed to go to the house of Rose Légère, but he was bound for the house of Joshua Lennox.

There he had plainly been expected. The liveried, tight-lipped servant, who opened the iron grill-work door for him, showed him deferentially down a long tiled hall and into, not the formal white and gilt reception-room, but a comfortable, dimly-lighted apartment, a smoking-room, hung with fading mediæval tapestries, the floor covered with deep rugs of the Orient, and the chairs wide, broad-armed, and upholstered in soft leather.

"Miss Lennox will be down in a moment, sir," said the servant. "May I bring you anything, Mr. Dyker?"

Wesley shook his well-shaped head.

"No, thank you, Charles," he answered, and then, nodding to a decanter that, under a wide, soft-shaded lamp, stood upon a corner table: "Irish?" he asked.

Charles bowed, brought a tray, and, when Dyker had poured the whiskey, added some seltzer, and lighted the cigarette that the guest had taken from a wrought silver box on a nearby tabouret.

"That is all, Charles," said Dyker, and the servant silently left him alone.

Wesley sank back in his chair with a sigh of comfort. He liked the house of the philanthropic merchant so well that he could have wished its master liked him better, and when, within a few minutes, the master himself chanced into the room, Dyker was prepared to be diplomatic.

Joshua N. Lennox was the explanation of that Mr. Porter who held so much power under him. The latter was tall and thin, the former short and compact, but there all physical differences ended: Mr. Porter had found his model in his employer. Here was the source of the seneschal's gray hair and side-whiskers, his trap mouth tortured to the line of benevolence, his calm gaze and his manner that combined the precision of the surgeon with the gravity of the head of a Sunday-school. Mr. Lennox, in fact, conducted the second largest Bible Class in New York. He knew its textbook from the first chapter of Genesis to the twenty-second chapter of the Revelation, and he believed in the literal inspiration of every verse of the original and of every syllable of the English translation.

It was in the voice in which he habitually addressed his Bible Class, the voice of one uttering a benediction, that he said:

"Good-evening, Mr. Dyker."

Wesley put down his glass and rose to his feet.

The man before him was the perfection of that noble work of Heaven, a Prominent Citizen. Joshua Lennox endowed Bowery chapels with organs and meat-supplies; he contributed heavily to missions among the benighted Japanese; he assisted in arbitrating strikes wherein his fellow-employers were concerned; he always served on memorial committees; and he regularly subscribed to the campaign funds of all movements toward municipal political reform.

If his climbing wife insisted upon having liquor in the house, Mr. Lennox never touched it. If she served tobacco, he did not smoke. If she took in a Sunday paper, written and printed on Saturday, he would read no news until the appearance of the Monday journal merely written and printed on Sunday. And if his mercantile establishment sold poker-chips under the pseudonym of "counters," he was aware only that it did not sell playing-cards. The business he considered as his creation had grown beyond the limits of his power, and though, a good man and sincere, he might have done something by keeping a closer eye upon his work, he was in reality as much the creature of conditions as his worst-paid cash-boy. The great Frederick complained that a monarch could not know all the evil done in his kingdom: Joshua Lennox was so busy benefiting mankind that he had no leisure to observe in his own shop the state of affairs that made his philanthropy financially possible.

"I hope you are going with us to the opera, Mr. Lennox," said Dyker.

The old man shook his silvered head.

"No," said he in the slow, deliberate utterance that he had acquired with his first million of dollars; "I am on my way farther down town than that."

"But you had better come," urged Wesley, knowing that refusal was certain. "This is the last performance of the season."

"On the contrary," the merchant chuckled kindly, "I think you had better let Marian go to the opera alone and come along with me. I am going to the first performance of a new season."

"Where's that?"

"To the Municipal Improvement Mass Meeting at Cooper Union."

That made it Dyker's turn to smile.

"Oh, but I couldn't do that," he said. "I'm on the other side, you know."

"Against good government?" The elder man manifestly enjoyed this mild thrust.

"Against irregularity, Mr. Lennox. There never has been and there never can be any lasting reform from the outside. We must clean our own houses. That is why I have moved to my present address. I believe in reform from within the party, and I believe that to effect this we want men of your sort to help us indoors and not to attack us from the street."

The merchant's cold eye looked hard at the speaker, but Dyker's lowered lids betrayed nothing.

"Yes," replied Lennox, dryly; "I heard that when Tammany Hall first came into power, but I have never seen any trace of reform from the inside. What I have seen is the spectacle of most of these inside reformers developing into leaders of the machine. If you will take an older man's advice, you will withdraw while there is yet time."

Wesley's reply sprang ready to his lips, but, before he could utter it, Marian Lennox came into the room.

Something of herself the girl received, no doubt, from her climbing mother; something, probably, from her satisfied father, and more than she guessed from a narrow environment. Nevertheless, four years at college had cultivated in her what seemed to be a spirit of independence, and a brief life in the city had confirmed in her what she was certain were opinions of her own.

She was tall and moved with assurance. Her full throat rose above the ermine of her cloak, supporting a delicately carved head, the head of a Greek cameo, held rigidly erect. The hair was a rich chestnut, the eyes large and brown, and the mouth at once firm and kindly. Her skin was very fair and her gloved hands long and slender.

She caught her father's concluding words.

"While there is yet time," she paraphrased, "Mr. Dyker will withdraw from this room and get me to the opera-house before the overture has ended. I am so unfashionable as to want my music entire."