Front matter

By

REGINALD WRIGHT KAUFFMAN

Author of "What is Socialism?" etc.

NEW YORK GROSSET & DUNLAP PUBLISHERS

COPYRIGHT, 1910, BY MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY NEW YORK

All Rights Reserved

Published August, 1910 Second Printing, November, 1910 Third Printing, December, 1910 Fourth Printing, January, 1911 Fifth Printing, February, 1911 Sixth Printing, February, 1911 Seventh Printing, March, 1911 Eighth Printing, March, 1911 Ninth Printing, April, 1911 Tenth Printing, April, 1911 Eleventh Printing, June, 1911 Twelfth Printing, July, 1911 Thirteenth Printing, August, 1911 Fourteenth Printing, October, 1911 Fifteenth Printing, February, 1912 Sixteenth Printing, April, 1912

THE QUINN & BODEN CO. PRESS RAHWAY, N. J.

TO ANDREW JOHN KAUFFMAN (1840-1899)

CAVEAT EMPTOR

This story is intended for three classes of readers, and no more. It is intended for those who have to bring up children, for those who have to bring up themselves, and for those who, in order that they may think of bettering the weaker, are, on their own part, strong enough to begin that task by bearing a knowledge of the truth.

For it is the truth only that I have told. Throughout this narrative there is no incident that is not a daily commonplace in the life of the underworld of every large city. If proof were needed, the newspapers have, during the last twelvemonth, proved as much. I have written only what I have myself seen and myself heard, and I set it down for none but those who may profit by it.

REGINALD WRIGHT KAUFFMAN.

NEW YORK CITY, 16th June, 1910

THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE

I "AS IF THE SPRING WERE ALL YOUR OWN"

The local weather-prophets—the cape-coated Mennonites and the bearded Amishmen, who came into the town to market—had said, with choral unanimity, that the spring would be brief and sudden, and the summer parching and intense.

Already, though April had but dawned, the pink arbutus had bloomed and withered, and the pale first violets were peeping, purple and fragrant, among the lush grass of the front yards on Second Street. The annual oriole was a full fortnight ahead of his time in opening his summer-house in the hickory-tree on the Southwarks' lawn; and up in the droning study-room of the high-school, where all the windows were wide to the lazy sunlight, Miss England had begun, this week, to direct the thoughts of her dwindling senior-class toward the subjects of their graduation essays.

Swaying with the easy, languid grace of an unstudied young animal, Mary Denbigh, the morning-session ended, turned from the graveled walk before the school-grounds into the little town's chief thoroughfare.

Nobody had ever called her pretty, but her light serge skirt had that day been lengthened to her ankles, and Mary was wholly conscious of the new tokens of her growth. Lithe, strong-limbed and firm-bodied, of peasant stock and peasant vigor, youth and health and the open country air were not factors sufficiently unfamiliar to combine in a charm that would attract admiration in her own community. Only a jaded city-gaze—and a well-trained city-gaze at that—would have seen in the blue eyes, the red mouth, the straight nose, pink cheeks, and abundant russet hair, any promise worthy of fulfillment,—could have detected the flower in the bud; and that such a gaze should, on this day of all days, have been leveled in the girl's direction was, perhaps, only one of those grim jests of a Fate that loves to play upon the harmony between man and nature, and that here observed the coming of a human spring that must be brief and sudden, a human summer parching and intense.

The usual group of idle residents and idling commercial drummers were sitting at the plate-glass window of the hotel as she went by, but the girl did not see them. Passing among objects of long familiarity, she saw, in fact, nothing until, in a side-street, she heard a rapid step behind her, was covered by an approaching shadow and, half-turning, found someone, a stranger, at her side.

"How d'y'do, liddle girl?"

Mary looked up; but she was quite too startled to observe anything save that the speaker—she could not have told whether he were man or boy—was at once dark and rosy, smiling and serious, hat in hand, and, beyond all speculation, no citizen of her own borough.

"I don't know you," she said.

She flushed quickly, and strode forward. It was, she knew, no uncommon thing for the girls of her acquaintance to be "picked up," as they called the process, by some fellow-townsman that had never been formally presented to them; but the process was, as she also knew, one that lost its propriety when extended to aliens.

The present alien was, nevertheless, not easily to be dismissed. He fell into her gait, and walked facilely beside her.

"I beg your pardon," he said in the humblest and most unobjectionable tones. "I don't mean to be rude to you, honest, I don't. I'm a traveling-man, you see——"

Mary was striding rapidly ahead, her full mouth now drawn firm, her blue eyes fixed on the vanishing-point.

"I don't care what you are," she answered.

"All righd," he pleaded. "All I vant now is a chanc't to exblain. I've chust started out traveling for my fader, who's a big distiller in N'York. I've got to stay in this hole for a vhile, un' I'm not used to the beesness, un' I'm lonesome, un' I only vondered if you vouldn't go vith me to a moving-picture show, or something, this evening."

The best way to deal with such a situation is a way that is easiest for the inexperienced and the unpolished. Mary was both. For the first time since he had begun to walk beside her, she now, coming to a defiant stop, faced her annoyer.

"I don't know you," she repeated. "I've told you that onc't, and you'd better not make me tell you any more still. I live the second door round the coming corner, and my pop is a puddler an' weighs two hundred and ten pounds!"

Again she wheeled and again resumed her homeward march; and this time she walked alone. If she heard, dimly, behind her a confused murmur of response, she did not hesitate to learn whether the words were expressions of further apology or new-born dismay, and when she ran, flushed and panting, up the three wooden steps to the two-story brick house that was her home, though she could not then deny herself one backward glance, that glance revealed to her only an empty corner. The pursuit had ended.

She flung open the light door that was never locked by day, walked down the short, darkened hall, past the curtain of the equally darkened parlor, through the dining-room with its pine table covered by a red cotton cloth, and so into the small, crowded kitchen, where her mother fretted and clattered above the highly polished range.

Mrs. Denbigh was a little Pennsylvania-German woman, whom a stern religion and a long life of hard work had not intellectually enlarged. In spite of the fact that she had borne eight children, of whom Mary was the seventh, her sympathies had failed to broaden, and her equally religious and equally hard-working Welsh husband used often to remark to her, during his one-monthly evening of intoxication, that he was glad indeed she was to have no more progeny, since, somehow or other, she "seemed to git wuss tempered with every innocent youngling as koom to 'un." Whether this criticism was or was not precise, it is at least true that much drudgery had not improved the weary woman's temper; that the long years before her husband rose to his present wages—years during which his wife had not only kept a house and reared a family, but had also added to the communal income by night-work as a dress-maker—had left her gray and stooped and hatchet-faced; and that, though of a race in which the maternal instinct runs almost to a passion, her patience with her remaining pair of home-biding children was frequently fragile and short.

Just now she looked up, a spoon in one hand and a pan in the other, her forehead damp, as always, with sweat, and her harassed eyes momentarily bright with anger.

"Where on earth have you been, anyways?" she shrilly inquired of Mary.

The girl's face instantly hardened from the excitement of her recent adventure to the sullenness behind which she always took refuge in these more usual domestic crises. What she might have confessed had she come home to a less overworked mother, it is, obviously, vain to conjecture; what she actually did was to lock within her breast the story that had been trembling on her red lips, and what she replied to Mrs. Denbigh's question was an ungracious:

"Been at school. Where d'you think?"

The mother straightened up as far as her long-stooped shoulders would permit.

"Think?" she echoed. "I guess I can guess still where you was. 'Less you was kep' in, you had ought t' been home five minutes ago, an' nobody's kep' in only five minutes. You've been flirtin' with some idiot of a boy on the street-corner yet—that's about what you've been doin'!"

It was a random shot, and one fired from no previous knowledge, but the girl at once realized that, had any neighbor chanced to see what had actually occurred, this parental construction would appear to have some foundation in fact. The thought was enough to seal the locked gate in her breast.

"That ain't so!" she said, with childish fury. "I come straight home, like I always do. If you want me to help more with the work than I do help, why don't you let me quit school? I don't want to go any more, anyhow."

There are some families in which the passing of the lie is no such uncommon or serious offense, and the Denbigh ménage was one of them. It was, therefore, upon the latter portion of Mary's speech that her mother, at this time, seized.

"You'll go to school as long as your pop and me say you must!" she retorted.

"You let our Etta quit when she was in the grammar school," expostulated Mary, with an appeal to the precedent of the successfully married sister, who was now a next-door neighbor. "You let her quit then, and now I'm in the high."

Had Mrs. Denbigh's rejoinder been in accordance with the facts, she would have said that all she wanted to do was to give her daughter as much of an education as was compatible with the proper conduct of the Denbigh domestic economy. But tired women are no more apt to indulge in analytical exposition than are tired men, and so it chanced that her next speech, accompanied by a gesture that raised the cooking-spoon aloft, was a torrent of words unexpectedly interrupted.

"In the high?" she repeated. "Well, I know where you'll be in one minute, still, if you don't right away——"

She brought the spoon forward with a mighty swoop, but its parabola, in crossing the stove, sent it into violent contact with the pot that held the stew destined for the noon dinner. The pot was balanced on the edge of an aperture in the stove whence the lid had been removed. The vessel fell, and its contents belched upon the burning coals.

Mrs. Denbigh gave one look at the steaming ruin, and then seized the already retreating Mary. The girl's struggles, her cries, the dignity of the newly lengthened skirt, avail nothing. A dozen times the mother's arm descended in stinging castigation, and then she hurried her daughter into the hall.

"You git right back to school!" she ordered. "I don't care if you're a half-hour early—you're mostly late enough. You've spoiled your own dinner and mine and little Sallie's, so you don't git nothin' to eat still till evening. You'll go to school, and you'll keep on goin' till your pop an' me tells you to quit!"

Mary looked at the woman without a word, and then, still without a word, passed through the front door and banged it behind her.

But she did not walk in the direction of the school; she was not going to school. The rebel-spirit of youth choked her, and turned her feet, almost without will of her own, toward the river.

She crossed the railroad tracks, came to the disused towpath and followed it for a mile beyond the town. Far westward she went, "walking," as she would have said, "her madness down," and, hungry though she now was, she did not rest until at last, as late as three o'clock in the afternoon, she sat on a rock at the point where the Susquehanna curves between the sheer precipice of Chicques on the Lancaster County side and the hooded nose of the high hill they call the Point, upon the other.

The flood of rebellion had ceased, but a steady and enduring stream of resolution remained.

Across the sweep of eddies she saw the nearer hills already shedding the browns and blacks of winter's bared limbs and pine branches for the tenderer green of a gentler season. The cultivated portions of the summits were already rich with coming life. Behind her rolled the Donegal Valley, where the crops were even then germinating. Birds were mating in the sap-wet trees beside the water, and from the flowering seeds there came the subtle, poignant scent of a warm April.

Something—something new and nameless and wonderful—rose in her throat and left her heart hammering an answer to the new world around her. She was glad—glad in spite of all her anger and her hunger; glad that she had not told her mother of the boy—for he must have been a boy—whom she had, after all, so needlessly reprimanded; but glad, above everything else, for some reason, for some intoxication that she might neither then nor ever after completely understand.

Her cheeks glowed a deeper pink; her blue eyes glistened; she opened her red mouth to the seductive sun and, with a sweep of her firm hands, flung loose her russet hair to the breeze. Looking out at the distant fields, she sprang to her feet again and walked, swaying with the easy, languid grace of an unstudied young animal.

The fields reminded her of the rural prophets. It was evident, she thought, that they were right: this year's was to be a spring brief and sudden, a summer parching and intense.

II A DEED OF TRUST

Mary Denbigh could not remember the day when the holy estate of matrimony had not been held up to her by others as the whole destiny of woman and had not presented itself as the natural, the easy, the sole path of escape from filial servitude.

She belonged, as has been intimated, to a race in which motherhood is an instinctive passion and an economic necessity, and she was born into a class in which not to marry is socially shameful and materially precarious. When she was very small, her own dolls were her own children and her playmates' dolls her children-in-law, and, when she grew older, she had always before her the sedulously maintained illusion of emancipation worn by those girls, but a few years her seniors, who had given up the drudgery of childhood, which she hated, for the drudgery of wifehood, which they loftily concealed. A young wife was a superior being, whose condition was not at all to be judged by the known condition of one's mother, and all the other and more intimate relations of marriage remained, to the uninitiate, a charmed mystery. If it seems strange to us that this mystery and this innocence remained to Mary at sixteen, the reflection rests not upon her from whom the secret kept its secrecy, but upon us to whom the innocence appears remarkable.

From a house that exacted everything and forgave nothing, a narrow house, which she could not see as simply an inevitable result of conditions as wide as the world, the girl looked out to that wonderful house next door where her sister had, only three years before, been taken as a bride. This sister was now an elegant person, who said "fore-head," "of-ten," and "a-gain," but Mary could remember Etta, in gingham frock and apron, performing the tasks that were now enforced upon Mary herself. And she could now observe—as, indeed, her sister's wholly conscious pride well intended that she should observe—Etta in clothes that were beyond the reach of an unmarried daughter of Owen Denbigh; Etta going to dances forbidden to a Denbigh maid. When she climbed reluctantly to bed at ten o'clock, Etta's lights blazed always wide awake, and when she rose in the gray of the morning, Etta's shutters were luxuriously closed.

Every dawn Mary must pack her father's dinner-bucket, as Etta used to pack it, before Owen started for the mill. That done, and the hurried breakfast eaten, she must make her own bed and wash the dishes before she set out for school. At noon there were more dishes, and only every other evening, before sitting down to detested study by the kerosene lamp in the dining-room, was she relieved of still more dish-washing by the growing, and apparently too favored, younger sister, Sallie.

The evening that followed Mary's truant walk along the river was one of those when she should have been granted this modicum of relief, but now, after the brief five o'clock supper, tow-headed Sallie set up a wail as the table was cleared.

"What's the matter with you now?" demanded Mrs. Denbigh, her harassed eyes blinking in the lamplight, and her hatchet-face more than commonly sharp.

"I ain't feelin' good," said Sallie. "I'm tired; I'm sick; I don't want to wash no dishes."

Mrs. Denbigh shot a glance through the double-doorway to the littered parlor; but the face of her unattentive husband was hidden behind the crinkling sheets of the Daily Spy, gripped by one great, grimy fist, while the stubby forefinger of the other hand spelled out the short syllables of the personal-column, facetiously headed "Our Card-Basket." His huge bulk bulged over all the edges of the uncomfortable patent armchair in which he was sitting: a picture of gorged contentment, there was as yet no help to be expected from him.

It was Mary, experienced in such attacks, who made ready to defend the law.

"You ain't sick," she declared.

"I am, too!" sniffed Sallie. "I'm awful sick!"

"Get out: you et more'n I did. You just want to make me do the work, an' I won't, 'cause it's your turn. So there!"

Mary's homecoming had, as it happened, not been the signal for a renewal of hostilities between her mother and herself. The former had just then been too hard at work to have either energy or thought in that direction, and throughout the evening meal the girl had deemed it wise to maintain a reticence calculated to keep her in the domestic background. Now, however, she had impulsively come forward, and the step at once brought her to Mrs. Denbigh's attention.

"After what you done this noon," she said to Mary, "you'd better keep your mouth shut. Go and wash them dishes!"

But Mary knew that she had now gone too far to retreat.

"It wasn't my fault the stew was spilled," she protested; "and anyhow, you did lick me onc't for that. Sallie just wants to shove her work off on me."

"I don't," blubbered Sallie. "I'll do 'em some evenin' when it's your turn."

"Yes," Mary sneered, "I know how you will."

"I will—I will—I will so!"

Sallie's voice rose to a shrill shriek, and then suddenly broke off in the middle of a note: there was a sound of elephantine stirring from the parlor, and the feared master of the house, moved at last from his lethargy, rolled into the double doorway and seemed nearly to block it.

One of the young reporters of The Spy had once remarked—not in print—that Owen Denbigh resembled nothing so much as the stern of an armored cruiser seen from a catboat. How much of the covering of his powerful frame was fat and how much muscle is matter for conjecture; his life in the iron mills had certainly given him a strength at least approaching the appearance, and had blackened his large hands, reddened his big face, and grayed his bristling hair and his fiercely flaring mustache.

"Whad's ahl this devil's racket?" he shouted, in the voice he used in triumphing over the turmoil of the puddling-furnace.

Both children quailed before him, each prepared regardless of its merits, for acquittal or condemnation, as he might decide the issue. Even Mrs. Denbigh drew back and set her lips to silence.

The giant raised a threatening hand.

"Be ye ahl gone deef?" he demanded. "Whad's ahl this devil's racket fur?"

In a panic of self-preservation, the two girls began at once to clamor forth their woes.

"Sallie won't wash the dishes!" cried Mary.

"I'm sick," sobbed Sarah, "an' mom says Mary must wash 'em because she upset the stew this noon-time!"

In the merits of any case brought before him, the household Solomon was as little interested as if he had been the judge of a law-court. His years of overwork had limited his sense of a just division of toil among others, and his long oppression by task-masters had made himself a merciless task-master. Like the men that had driven him, he delighted most in driving those who were the hardest to drive. Sallie was too young to furnish appreciable resistance, but in the awakening Mary he now saw something that approached worthy opposition. He turned first to his wife.

"Did you tell 'er," he inquired, his stubby forefinger leveled at Mary—"did you tell 'er to wash 'un?"

Mrs. Denbigh bowed her sweating forehead in timid assent.

Then the father looked again at the offender.

"Wash 'un!" he ordered, and marched back to his parlor, his armchair, and his evening paper.

Mary knew her father too well not to know also the price of disobedience. Sullenly, but without hesitation, she retreated to the little kitchen and took up her uncongenial task.

Girlhood, then, must be denied much of its claim to recreation; the social machine was pitiless. Young life was a period of menial service from which the sole escape was marriage, whether to stranger or to friend. That a stranger should harm her was, to Mary—as it is to most girls of her age and environment—an idea unentertained: strangers were too few, and the world of moral fact too closely shut and guarded. Boys she had always been cautioned against in vague generalities; but she understood that they were prohibited because their company was a delectable luxury reserved for older and marriageable girls whose younger sisters were needed only to help in the household tasks.

Rebellion once more reddened her heart—rebellion, as she thought, against her own particular condition, but the old rebellion, actually, that burns, at one time or another, in every heart: the revolt of the individual, more or less conscious of its individuality, against the conditions that are combined to crush it. She poured the water from the heavy iron tea-kettle into the tin dishpan with a quick anger that was not eased when two or three of the scalding drops leaped back against her bared, round arms. She flung the home-boiled soap after the water, and she clattered the dishes as loudly as she dared. Through the window—her soul hot with the sense of the injustice done her—she could see the happy lights in Etta's house, and, her hands deep in the greasy fluid, it came to her suddenly that she had been a fool to neglect—to repudiate—to-day what might have been the golden chance to such an estate as her sister's.

She had heard the protesting Sarah sent to bed; had heard her mother return to the parlor with the sewing-basket, and, finally, as she was putting away the last of the dishes in the china-closet in the dining-room, she caught the voices of both of her parents.

Dimly glimpsed from the small apartment beyond, she knew the scene well enough to reconstruct it perfectly. The crowded little parlor was like a hundred others in the immediate neighborhood, a mathematical result of the community of which it was a part. There were the two front windows with the horse-hair chairs before each and, between them, the marble-top table bearing the family Bible. There was the gilt mirror over the gorgeously lambrequined mantelpiece, which was littered with a brass clock, dried-grass-bearing yellow vases, stiff photographs of dead or married younger Denbighs, and "memorial cards" with illegible gilt lettering upon a ground of black. Close by the cabinet-organ on one side and the green sofa on the other—the sofa adorned with a lace "tidy" that would never remain neatly in its place—her father and mother sat, separated by the purple-covered center-table, their gaze interrupted by the tall glass case that contained the bunch of white immortelles from the grave of their eldest son.

Mrs. Denbigh was finishing, it seemed, the narrative of the town's latest scandal.

"I never knowed Mrs. Drumbaugh was that soft-hearted," the mother was saying. "Nobody in town was fooled over the reason for why her Jennie went away, an' yet here the girl comes back a'ready, and Mrs. Drumbaugh, church-member though she is, takes her into the house ag'in—her an' her baby along with her."

What was it in the words that brought Mary to a sudden pause? Her mother had always been, like most drudges, a gossip, and had sought, in repeating scandal about her acquaintances, that relief from drudgery which she knew how to obtain only by this second-hand thrill of evil. The girl had heard and disregarded the telling of many such a tale, and yet, to-night, she stood there first listening in uncomprehending horror to the narrative and then awaiting the inevitable paternal comment upon it.

"Tuke 'er bahk, hey?" rumbled Owen Denbigh. "Well, ef she bay sooch a fule, she deserves the scandal ov't. Thank God no youngling o' ourn ever went the devil's way. I hahve ahlways bin sure what I'd do to 'un ef she did, though."

He paused a moment, as if to have his wife inquire as to the terrible punishment that he had reserved for such an error, and then, as no inquiry was forthcoming, he gave his statement at any rate, with all the cold ferocity of a Judge Jeffries pronouncing sentence.

"Bay 'un thirty year old an' noot another sin ag'in 'un," he declared, "I would beat 'un within a bare inch o' 'er deeth, an' turn 'un oot to live the life 'un had picked fur herself!"

The whole intent of that speech Mary was incapable of comprehending, but she understood enough to tremble and then to fan to destructive fury the fire of her rebellion. Of a sudden, the atmosphere of the house had become unendurable. She was gasping like a sparrow under a bell-glass.

Stealthily she crept into the hall. Carefully she took her coat and faded hat from the rack. Very gently she opened the front door and stole into the street. She felt dumbly that the world was wrong, that youth should not have to work, and that to seize the fruit of pleasure should not be matter far punishment, but for congratulation.

I do not think that she meant to pass by the hotel that evening. I do not believe that most of us, in such moments, are actuated any more by motive than we are directed by discretion. Nevertheless, when the clutch of her emotions had enough loosened from her throat to permit her to take account of her whereabouts, the time, and the place, it was a quarter after six by the town-clock; Mary was just before the plate-glass window where the drummers sat, and, only a minute later, the stranger of the morning was again at her side.

"Von't you chust say that you're not mad vith me?" he was asking.

She was so frightened that she was conscious of no other definite sensation, much less of any ordered thought or opinion; but she looked fairly at him, and of what she saw she was immediately fully aware.

He was a young man, but the sort of young man that might be anywhere from nineteen to thirty-two, because he had the figure and the face of the former age and the eyes and the expression of the latter. The hair on his head was black and curly; though his hands were not the working-hands with which Mary was best acquainted, they were almost covered with a lighter down of the same growth; and through the pale olive of his sorely clean-shaven cheeks shone the blue-black hint of a wiry beard fighting for freedom. His lips were thick when he did not smile and thin when he did, with teeth very white; and his gray glance had a penetrating calculation about it that made the girl instinctively draw her coat together and button it.

To his speech she could pay, just then, scarcely any attention, except to feel that its quick, thick quality, and its ictus on the vowels, denoted the foreigner; but his clothes were a marvel that would not be denied. His coat and trousers of green were cut in the extreme of a fashion that was new to her; his brown plush hat was turned far down on one side and far up on the other; his waistcoat, of purple striped by white, was held by large mother-of-pearl buttons, and his shoes, long and pointed, were the color of lemons.

Impulsively she had refused an answer to his first words; but the young man was a member of the persistent race, and speedily followed the first speech with a second.

"Chust say the vord," he pleaded, "und I von' bother you no more. I only vanted to make myself square vith you."

Mary hesitated. Something, she knew, she feared, but whether it was the man, herself, or the habit of obedience she could not tell. He was polite, he was respectful; he came, it was clear, from a happier world than her own—and, as against her own she was now in open revolt, a certain parley with this visitor from an alien orb seemed likely to constitute a fitting declaration of independence. Conditions had worked upon her to desperation, and the same conditions, little as she guessed it, had, under the mask of chance, inevitably provided this avenue of protest.

"Oh," she said, "I'm not mad at you, if that's what you want to know."

"I'm glad of that," he easily answered, as they turned, quite naturally, away from the main street. "But I thought you gonsidered me fresh."

"Well, I hadn't never been introduced to you, you know."

The young man laughed.

"I'll introduce myself!" said he. "My name's Max Grossman—not my real name, because I vas born in Hungary an' nobody could say my real name ofer here. My fader is a big distiller in New York—he's vorth half a million un' more: anybody'll tell you about him. 'Und he's put me on the road for him."

This and much more he told her in the following minutes. He drew a truly brilliant picture of his parental home, and, animadverting now and then with scorn on the town in which he now found himself, he painted in the highest colors the glory of Manhattan.

New York, it appeared, was a city of splendid leisure. Its entire four millions of population spent their days in rest and their nights in amusement. There were the rumbling cable-cars, the roaring elevated trains, the subway expresses, which reached out and drew the Battery within twenty minutes of the Bronx. There were the realities that had been only vague magic names to this girl: the East Side, the Bowery, the Metropolitan Opera House, the Waldorf. Nobody went to bed before three o'clock in the morning, or woke before one in the afternoon. Nobody was ugly and nobody was old. There were no books to study, no errands to run, no dishes to wash. There were only the cabs and the taxis to ride in, the hundred theaters to see, the cafés and the music, Fifth Avenue with its palaces, and Broadway, from Thirty-fourth to Forty-third "von big, yellow, happy electric lighd."

She listened. As he spoke, though she did not know it, the far-off orchestras were calling her, as if the sound of the city deafened her to all other sounds, as if the lights of New York blinded her to the lights of home.

Her own story, as she in turn briefly told it to him, provided her with the one touch of contrast needed to make the lure of the new dream complete, provided him with the one text necessary for the implications he frankly wanted her to receive. She was already so metropolitan that, when she agreed to go to the moving-picture show, she passed the portals of "The Happy Hour," as the place was optimistically entitled, with a superior scorn for all that it had to offer.

The narrow hall was dark when they entered—Max pocketing the large roll of yellow bills from which he had drawn the price of their admission—and, as they sat down, half-way toward the stage, there was being shown, on the screen, the absurd adventures of a tramp, who entered an ornate hotel grill-room and who, among wondering, well-dressed guests, was proceeding to order an elaborate meal.

"That's the Astor," whispered Max, loudly. "I'd know id anyvheres."

The pictured tramp was, of course, unable to pay his score, and, equally, of course, was pursued as he leaped through an open window.

Max acted as Mary's guide during the tableaux of the chase that followed. Now the quarry was darting among the congested traffic of Times Square; now he had clambered over the platform of a Forty-second Street surface-car; now he was running up the steep stairway of the Sixth Avenue "L," and now, the hunters close at his heels, he was dashing along Thirty-fourth Street past the Waldorf, turning down toward the Park Avenue Hotel, and so, at last, was caught at the nearby entrance to the subway.

When the lights flared up at the conclusion of the little drama, Mary sighed as if suddenly plunged from fairyland down to the real world below. And then the sigh changed to a gasp of fright: in the same row, only six seats away, her sister Etta was sitting.

The girl started to rise.

"Vhat's wrong?" asked the astonished Max.

"I must go. Don't come out with me. Wait a minute, and then follow. I'll be at the next corner up street. That's our Etta over there!"

But Max did not seem fully to comprehend the warning. He rose with Mary, and made some stir in doing it, so that, as the pair reached the aisle, Etta's eyes were drawn in the direction of her sister and the man.

Mary, though she hastily turned her head, thought that she saw recognition in this sudden glance. She thought that she saw recognition turn to amazement, and amazement to rebuke. Instantly, there rose before her the reefs of ultimate domestic disaster. With Max in close attendance, she hurried to the door.

Outside she did not speak until they had reached the comparative seclusion of a less frequented street. Then she turned hotly upon the youth, whom she considered the cause of her peril.

"Why was you such a fool?" she demanded. "Didn't you hear me say for you not to come out when I did?"

"I didn't understand you," Max humbly expostulated. "But vhat difference does it make, anyvays?"

"Difference? Why, you were so blamed noisy that Etta looked round an' seen me. She'll go straight home and tell pop I was here with you."

"Vell," protested Max, "it's not seven o'clock yet, und I'm not eatin' you, vas I?"

"That don't matter. You don't know my pop!"

"Vhat'll he do?"

"He'll"—Mary remembered previous punishments for smaller offenses, and recalled the judgment that she had heard her father pronounce on a hypothetical offender. "He'll beat me till I'm near dead," she declared; "an' then, like as not, he'll turn me out of the house."

They were at pause in the shadow of an old buttonwood tree, Max leaning against the gnarled trunk, the girl facing him, erect.

Even as she sketched her possible punishment, the possible became probable. She was afraid, and this young man, who had been so deferential, so protecting, who had given her so alluring a glimpse of another world, seemed her only refuge.

He put out his hands and, gently, took both of hers.

At that touch the last of her anger melted, almost to tears.

"Look here," he said. "I've been decent to you, haven't I? I ain't tried to get fresh?"

She shook her head, not trusting speech.

"Vell, then, listen here," he pursued. "If your old man gets gay, chust remember that. You ain't treated righd at home, the best of times. You said so yourself. Un' this here jay town's no place for a pretty young lady like you, anyvays. So, if there's any trouble, you come for me, und I'll get you avay from here."

The girl thrilled with a delicious sense of adventure. She trembled with the foretaste of a new delight. The passing praise of her looks and of her newly acquired maturity, a novel sound in her ears, was not lost upon her; but even that was dwarfed by the tenor of her companion's words, and the wonderful current that ran from his hands to hers. Was this what had been meant, that truant afternoon, by the calling birds, the leafing trees and the poignant air along the river? Was this what young women felt when lovers told their love? She could not have formulated the questions, but her heart asked them, and Max, meanwhile, was repeating:

"I'll get you avay from here!"

"How—how could you do it?" she gasped.

"It'd be dead easy. If there's any scrap, you vatch your chanc't un' give the house the slip. I'll be vaitin' at the hotel till midnight. Delephone me from the nearest drugstore, un' ve'll take a trolley down the line un' catch a train to N'York un' be married there this same nighd. I've a friend who's a minister un' vill get out of his bed any hour I'd ask him."

He pressed her hands tighter, and, as he leaned against the tree, drew her slightly toward him.

But Mary, though she did not know why, still fearful, held back.

"I—we couldn't do that," she said.

"Vhy not?" he demanded.

"Because—why, we couldn't go away together, alone: it wouldn't be right."

Max straightened suddenly. He released her hands and placed one tight arm about her waist.

"It vould be righd if I lofed you," he said. "Und I do lof you. Ve city folk, ve can't do things slow-like you liddle town people. Vhen I saw you this morning, I knew I liked you, because you vas so different from all these rubes around here; un' vhen I talk vith you this efenin' I know I lof you. Listen here: you come avay with me to-nighd. Ve vill go righd ofer to N'York, un' there ve get married righd avay. No more school, nor dishvashin', nor scoldin'. Your own fader vill be pleased vhen it's ofer, because my fader is reech, un' my fader vill be pleased too, because he's been devilin' me to marry for more'n a ye-ar, only I nefer till now found a girl I lof. Come on, Mary: I lof you!"

Her eyes swam in a mist. They had come then—love and freedom, hand in hand. Her soul grew faint within her. She struggled a little, fluttering like a young bird in a capturing palm, but he drew her tighter, and his free hand passed electrically across her cheek.

"Come on avay!" he urged softly.

"I—I don't know what to do!" she panted. "Wait—wait "—it was the ancient cry of womanhood upon the brink—"wait till to-morrow!"

There was a step behind them, which Max was the first to hear. He freed her, and they stood mute until the shadowy passer-by had gone. It was an incident that at least lessened the spell.

"Perhaps it's all right," said Mary. "Perhaps Etta didn't see me, an' I can tell 'em I was over at my girl-friend's."

"It's only puttin' off vhat's got to happen sometime," Max argued. "This town's no place for a girl like you."

He leaned toward her, but she drew, reluctantly, away. What might be well by day may well seem ill by night.

"Wait till to-morrow, anyhow," she urged.—But to-morrow, she wondered, how should she explain her afternoon away from school?

Max considered.

"All righd," he at last nodded. "Go home un' think things ofer vith yourself; but I'll be chust as ready to-morrow as I am to-day. You've got to get avay from all this ugliness. Remember that, un' remember I hafn't been fresh, un' I vant righd now to marry you. I hafn't efen tried to kiss you. Think of that, un' think that I'll be vaitin' up at the hotel, in case of drouble, till midnighd."

He wheeled at that, and left her.

Ten minutes later—at a quarter to seven, so rapidly had the drama unrolled itself—she had reached home to find that Etta had been there before her. Denbigh, on the early morning shift that week, was already in bed, but her mother tossed the truant into the parlor and locked both doors while she went up stairs to waken him.

He came down at once, in his nightshirt, roaring. He turned the key and flung wide the door.

The room, however, was empty, and the window open. Mary and Max were already together, hurrying through the warm spring evening toward the trolley-car that was to carry them on the first stage of their journey to New York.

III THE SPECTER OF FEAR

A sixteen an angry and frightened girl running away from a home where the necessity for work must cheat her youth of its just rights—at sixteen such a girl cannot analyze her emotions, and Mary's were in sheer panic. She had never before been farther from her own town than the ten miles' distant county-seat, had never before been at more than verbal odds with her parents. Philadelphia had stood for the City of Lanterns, and a quick retort for revolution. Now she was bound for New York and marriage.

There was none of the few persons on the trolley-car that knew her, yet she kept her face to the window and away from them. There was no chance of capture, yet she trembled whenever the brakes creaked and a new passenger came aboard. It might, perhaps, be truly said that she did not feel at all, and that the power of poignant realization was still paralyzed by her own action. It was as if she had amputated a portion of her spiritual being, and wras still numb from the shock.

Whatever Max's own feelings, he at any rate conducted himself in the manner least calculated to rouse his companion. He spoke only to give the few necessary directions, and then in a low tone, not facing her, but looking straight ahead. He had slipped her the money to pay her own fare and, the better to deceive whoever might follow them, had told her to buy a round-trip ticket to a point beyond that for which they were bound. With his lemon-colored shoes planted upon his suitcase, he sat beside her, but he kept as wide a space between them as the short seat would permit; and it was only under the discreet covering of the light overcoat upon his knee that he kept a tight and reassuring grasp of her firm hand.

At a mile from the county-town they left the car—Mary first and Max twenty yards behind—and then, for the competent young man seemed to have prepared for everything, walked across the fields, under the stars, to a flag-station where, within a few minutes, they could catch a New York express. Arm in arm they walked, but Max never once frightened her by a burst of affection, never once did more than to encourage her by plain statements of his loyalty and more ornate descriptions of the life before her.

"You vill like it," he concluded. "I know you vill be happy, Mary."

Mary's breath caught a little in her throat.

"Ye—yes," she answered. "Only, I can't help thinking some about mom."

"Sure you can't," Max immediately agreed. "You mustn't led her vorry longer than you can help it. I tell you vhat ve'll do. Ofer here in the station, you wride her a letter und I'll haf it mailed."

"Oh, but then pop would see it, an' he might follow us!"

"Don' gif no names or say vhere ve're goin', und how can he? By the time he gets it, ve'll be safe married, anyways. Here ve are at the station. I've got some paper un' pencil und an envellup: I'll tell you chust vhat to wride."

He did tell her, and this note, given to the train-porter, was mailed farther along the line:

"Dear Mother: Don't please worry about me. I will soon be back for a visit, only I have gone to Buffalo to get married. He is a nice young man and his father is rich, for I could not stand to have Pop beat me, nor do other people's work any more.

"Your aff. daughter, "MARY DENBIGH."

The train, which Max had duly signaled, had stopped just as the writing was ended, and the pair of runaways had hurried into the last seat of the rear car.

During the journey that followed, Mary's nerves, accustomed to early hours, gave way not to tears, but to the exhaustion consequent upon the strain of her crowded day. Her hat in her lap, her russet hair made a pillow for her against the sharp window-sill, and, with Max's coat piled at the pane to protect her from the keen arrows of the inrushing night air, she lay back, the pink cheeks and the red mouth paler than an hour since, and the blue eyes closed. She did not seem to sleep, and yet it was in a dream that the ride ended, in a dream that she found herself one of a hurrying crowd stamping down the platform and into the huge elevator at the Jersey City station, in a dream that she clung faithfully to Max's arm as the sudden lights and damp odors struck her and as she dropped upon a straw-covered bench of a swaying car, which shot them immediately through a tunneled darkness into the very depths of the earth.

She knew from her geography that New York was separated from New Jersey by water.

"When do we cross the ferry, Max?" she asked.

Max smiled, his thin lips showing his white teeth in sharp contrast to his olive skin.

"We're crossing it now," he answered.

"But where's the water?"

Max, mopping his dark forehead with a purple-bordered handkerchief, pointed to the roof of the car.

"Up there," he said. "Ve're in the tube, you know."

She did not know, but she was too much ashamed of her rural ignorance further to discover it by unconsidered questions, and so full of a pulsing wonder at what was to come next, so full of the expectation of the child at her first melodrama that she had place for no backward thought. She sat silent until they had come out of the tunnel, climbed a windy stair, and emerged upon a thoroughfare as much ablaze as if all the stars of heaven had descended to light it, and as brimming with moving life as her father's mill at ten o'clock in the morning.

Max regarded the girl's open-eyed wonder.

"Now," he said, "ve'll chust chump in a taxi un' go get a good supper, un' then, vhile the vaiter's filling our order, I'll first do a little delephoning."

He put up his dark hand; a passing automobile, its tin flag raised, hummed up to the curb, and Mary, clinging timidly to the arm of her betrothed, began her first ride in a taxicab.

The street—it was Fourteenth Street, he told her—flared and seethed and spluttered before them. As if leaning over the head of a runaway horse, they shot in and out among clanging cable-cars, dashed by snorting vehicles of their own sort, and nearly grazed jostling cabs driven by cursing Jehus. Even at that late hour, some of the shops were still open, and the wide pavements on either side were black with countermarching processions of people, moving with the steady rapidity and stolidity of a swarm of ants. When the street ran by a tree-sprinkled square, its houses seemed to burst into still greater brightness to atone for the darkness of the park. Every second building was a restaurant, a theater for moving-pictures, or a saloon. Their electric-signs now winked from nothingness to light, now flashed forth a word, one letter at a time, and now were surrounded with wriggling snakes of fire.

It came upon her—this vision of the absolutely new, of the city's immensity and teeming life—at a moment when her heart was ready for reaction, when memory was prepared to reassert itself, and when, anger gone and regret poised like a runner at the starting-line, her quick determination might have failed her. But it came with stupefying force. The dream of pleasure gave place for the moment to a certainty of dread. Vaguely, unreasoningly, but with the unquestioning acceptance of a child, she felt New York as a terrible, solidified unity; as a vast, malevolent consciousness; as a living prison that implacably and resistlessly raised itself on every hand and on every hand shut her in forever.

She trembled and clung the tighter to her companion's arm, and her companion was alert to note her agitation.

"Vhat's the matter?" he inquired, in a voice that he well meant to be tender.

"I—I don't know," she began, her red underlip indrawn. "I—aren't we goin' pretty fast?"

"Who? Us? Vhy, I was chust thinking I'd tell him to hit up the pace a little. Are you scared?"

Her pride would not permit confession.

"Oh, no," she lied; "I'm not scared."

"But you are shivering."

"I guess I'm kind of chilly."

"All righd. Chust vait a minute un' ve'll soon be at the restaurant un' varm up. You'll like that restaurant: it's von of the swellest in town."

"But it's pretty late," she ventured. "Your friend—are you sure he——"

"Who? The minister?" Max patted her hand with reassuring affection. "Don't you vorry about him. He's all for me, und I'll get him out of bed chust as soon as ve've ordered our supper."

A few blocks more, and Max, aided by a marvelously tall person in a wonderful uniform, was helping her, with what she considered an elaborate courtesy, to dismount from the taxi, pass under a glass awning and, through a changing stream of hurrying waiters and arriving and departing guests terribly arrayed, to climb a softly carpeted stair and enter a brilliant balcony open to the street and full of chattering men and women eating and drinking at a score of tables. Even in her fright, it was with a touch of admiration that she observed how Max—her Max—seemed to be known to the immediately attentive waiters, and how, smiling, they hurried to make way for him.

They secured a corner table, a relatively quiet corner table, and there, with a servant standing by, pencil in hand, and with a huge double-paged menu-card before each of them, made ready for their meal.

"Chust you order vhatever you like," said Max. "Pretty near everything in the vorld's on there, but if you vant anything that you can't see, chust you ask for it."

Mary looked at the card. In spite of all that had passed, and all that now filled her heart, she was young, and youth is so fortunate as to be able to eat in the trough of any emotional sea. She was a child, and, by the sure logic of childhood, who-so thought to feed her could be nothing but a friend.

The card, however, was of small assistance. Its very size was appalling, and its offerings were made in an unfamiliar tongue.

"You get what you like," she at last submitted. "I'm so hungry I can eat anything."

He saw her difficulty so well that he could rescue her from it without seeming to see it at all.

"Vell, I'm vith you there," he said cheerfully, and proceeded to obey her, rattling off a list of dishes of no one of which she had ever heard before. "Un' have the Martinis dry," he cautioned in conclusion, "vith a dash of absinthe in them—un' bring them righd avay: I'm spittin' gotten."

The waiter left, and, as he did so, Max again addressed the girl.

"Excuse me for von minute," he said.

But Mary's blue eyes opened wide in instant alarm, and she put a detaining hand upon his wrist.

"Don't!" she quavered. "Don't go away! I—I don't want to be left alone."

Max laughed outright.

"Haf you forgot our minister?" he demanded. "Ve don't vant to go to his house vithout first giffin' him a chanc't to get some clothes on. Efen up your vay, the ministers vear a suit under their nighd-gowns vhen they marry people."

She smiled faintly at his labored wit, and, as her heart fluttered at this definite approach to the end of her journey, permitted him to go.

Had he been absent for only the minute that he had promised, the time would have seemed long to the waiting girl, but he remained invisible for much longer, and to Mary, watching the laughing, uncaring strangers from another life, the terror of the city in her soul and the sense of all that she had done lurking in the shadows of her brain, the quarter of an hour appeared to be four times that period. Once she feared that he had met with some accident; once she was saved from starting in search of him only by the knowledge that, in so doing, she must infallibly lose herself. She would have made inquiries of a waiter, but the waiters were too imposing. She would have cried, but she was afraid to cry. She would have ended, perhaps, by some utter betrayal of all that was battling within her; but, just when she was sure, for the thousandth time, that she could endure no more, she saw Max coming toward her from the long-watched door.

As soon as she noticed his strangely stern face, the old fear gave place to a fresh one.

"What's happened?" she asked.

He pulled back his chair spitefully and flung himself into it.

"These crazy laws of your America," he snarled, "there ain't no sense in them!"

"What's the matter?" she repeated.

"Vhy, it's this way. Of course, it don' make no difference; it only puts things off till mornin'; but it's this vay: I got my minister friend on the 'phone, un' he's all ready to marry us, only he says the law says ve must haf a license from City Hall first, un' if ve don't get von, he can go to chail because of marryin' us vithout it."

"Well," said Mary, "let's get a license."

Max spread forward the palms of his dark hands.

"How can ve?" he demanded. "The City Hall closes in the afternoon un' don't open till mornin'."

Here, apparently, was tragedy. Specific reasons for its tragic elements the girl would, perhaps, have found it hard to give, but that it was tragic she knew instinctively. Her blue eyes opened wide in fright.

"What are we to do?" she pleaded.

But Max, the resourceful, had been, it appeared, only temporarily checkmated.

"I thought of that," he said. "Ve can't get married now till to-morrow; but my modder has a good friend un' I delephone her. She told me she'd be glad to have you her guest ofer to-nighd. I'll take you there in a taxi, un' go home for my own sleep. I'd take you vith me, but it vouldn't do to spring a new vife on the family vithout varnin'. Then I'll have talked vith my own people, und I'll bring them around to the veddin', first thing in the mornin'."

Mary, however, quailed.

"I don't want to do that," she inconsequently responded. "I don't want to go to strange people's alone."

"Oh, don't you vorry, now," Max soothed her. "I'll go vith you for a liddle vhile un' see that you make yourself at home. This friend of my modder's is a fine voman, un' she's rich. She is Mrs. Légère. She lives in a fine house: you'll like her."

He persisted in his persuasions, and, in the end, he won her acquiescence. After all, here were the walls of the city about her, and she had no choice.

While they had been talking, the waiter had returned and had placed before each of them one of the stemmed glasses full of the pale yellow concoction that Max had ordered.

"Vell," grinned the host, "here's happy returns of the day un' many of them."

He took his glass in his hairy hand and flung the contents down his throat.

But Mary looked at the drink in growing alarm.

"Isn't it whiskey?" she asked.

"No-o-o! I don't drink vhiskey. This is only vermout' un' tchin."

"Gin's just the same as whiskey," the girl protested.

"Not by a long sighd it ain't."

"It's liquor, anyhow."

"Sure, it's liquor; but drink a liddle of it; it vill gif you an appetite."

Mary shook her russet head.

"I don't need no appetite," she said; "I'm half starved as it is."

"You'll need something to grind up these here Hungarian things, though."

"No," said Mary; "I'd rather not."

"But efferybody does here in New York."

"Then I guess I'll wait till I'm a regular New Yorker."

"Don't your fader drink?"

"Sometimes he does," said the girl, conclusively; "an' that's why I don't."

He urged her no further; he even denied himself a glass of the wine that he had ordered, and he succeeded, by this abstinence, in regaining whatever he had lost of her faith in him. He ate heartily himself, and if his manner of eating was not precisely that most common in restaurants of a more careful sort, this was something that the girl would have failed to note even had she not been so busily engaged by wonder at the service and consumption of the novel food. It was not until, contentedly sighing, she had sunk back from the wreck of her second ice, that she remembered again the lateness of the hour.

With a display of his large bills and another flurry of attendants, they left the restaurant, walking among the gayly dressed and loudly laughing people at the tables, passing down the heavily carpeted stairs, and entering another pulsing motor-car. Max leaned out of the door and gave an address that Mary did not hear; the chauffeur threw forward the metal clutch, and the automobile shot ahead on its journey.

They went for some time under the still hammering elevated; then turned through a quieter and darker street; threaded rapidly, twisting hither and yon, a dozen other highways and byways and at length drew up at their destination. Max leaped lightly to the pavement and tossed the driver a bill.

"Neffer mind the change," he said, and had scarcely helped Mary to dismount before the car had snorted away into the night, leaving the pair of young lovers in the scarcely broken darkness and in a silence that seemed surrounded by a dim, distant rumble of city-sound.

The girl could see little of her whereabouts. She observed only that she was in a slumbering block of blinded dwelling-houses, a scene different from any that New York had thus far presented to her. One distant, sputtering arc-light succeeded only in accentuating the gloom; underfoot the way resounded to the slightest tread; from the little patch of inky sky into which the roofs blended above, a bare handful of anæmic stars twinkled drowsily, and, on both sides, from corner to corner, the uniform, narrow houses rose in somber repetition, each with its brief, abrupt flight of steps, each with its blank windows, each seemingly asleep behind its mask.

More than this, indeed, Mary's tired eyes could have had no time to observe, for Max's strong fingers were at once curled under her armpit, and she was hurried up to one of the innumerable mute doorways. He pressed a button hidden somewhere in the wall, and, almost immediately, the door swung open.

The pair looked from darkness upon a rosy twilight. Under the feeble rays of the pink-shadowed stairway, there were just visible the outlines of a full-blown form.

"Hello, Rosie!" cried Max as, quickly snapping the door behind him, he passed by his charge and seized an invisible hand. "You vaited up for us un' come to the door yourself! That vas good of you."

In spite of her Gallic cognomen, Mrs. Rose Légère replied in the tone and vernacular of Manhattan Island.

"Sure I waited for you," she answered. "But don't talk so loud: you'll wake the whole family.—And is this the little lady, eh?"

Half disposed to resist, Mary felt herself gently propelled forward by Max, and then enveloped in an ample, strangely perfumed embrace, while two full warm lips printed a kiss upon her cool young cheek.

"Come into the back parlor," said Rose Légère, lightly seizing the girl's hand. "I want to get a look at the bride."

She led the way past the closed double doors of the front room on the ground floor, and into a rear apartment that, though not brilliantly illuminated, was far better lighted than the hall.

It was a room the like of which Mary had never seen, decorated in colors that outshone the rainbow and filled to overflowing with furniture that, to the undiscriminating eyes of the girl, gave it the air of a chamber in the Cave of Monte Cristo. Gilt-framed pictures of beautiful men and women—she supposed they must be Grecian men and women—flamed, in more than lifelike hues, from the crimson walls. The tall lamp on the blue-clothed table was shaded in red; the thick rug flowered gorgeously; the deep chairs were upholstered in pale brown, and the lazy sofa on which, as Max closed the inner door upon their entrance, Mrs. Légère seated herself with her guest, was stuffed with soft pillows of bewildering radiance.

Nor, when Mary came to look at her, did the hostess seem out of keeping with her surroundings. To the girl's home Owen Denbigh had once brought a large, lithographed calendar, issued by a brewery, and depicting, at its top, a woman of the elder Teutonic days, very red and white, with long yellow hair, and a body of rounded proportions, which threatened to grind to powder the rock on which she sat, and desperately endangered the filmy garments that enfolded without clothing her. It was of this picture that Mary instantly thought when she got her first full view of Mrs. Légère.

The hostess was clad in a long, fluttering, baby-blue kimona, spotted by embroidered white dragons, with sleeves that fell despairingly from her puckered elbows, disclosing thick white arms with rolls of fat at the wrists, and plump hands and fingers the almond shaped nails of which gleamed like the points of daggers. The folds of light silk, held by a large amethyst pin at the base of her sturdy throat, bulged broadly over her capacious breasts and trailed, across frou-frouing lace, far beyond her heels.

All this Mary saw first, and then, looking upward across the figure that, literally, overshadowed her, she saw a large, round, good-enough-natured face, surmounting a white double chin. The corn-colored hair was massed in an intricate maze of puffs and coils and braids, which made the girl wonder how much was its owner's natural growth and how much was due to the artifices that Mary had always longed for and had always been denied. The forehead was low and calm; the violet eyes of a more than natural brightness, with crowsfeet beside them and pouches below, only just discernible in lamplight. The brows and lashes were of a blackness that contrasted with the coiffure; the skin, here like snow and there as red as roses, and the full, easy-going mouth as crimson as a wound. Mary thought that here at last was a beautiful woman.

"I sure am glad to see you," purred Mrs. Légère, as, having divested the guest of hat and coat, she whisked these into the hall and, returning, again seated herself and fondled the visitor's passive, but flattered, hand between her own extensive, well-cared-for palms. "Max raved about you over the telephone—just raved—and, now that I get to a clinch with you, I begin to think that he knew what he was talking about."

Max was seating himself on an orange-colored ottoman opposite them. He grinned broadly, his narrowed lips showing his even, sparkling teeth.

"Sure I knew vhat I vas talkin' about," he declared.

Mary was not used to compliments, but she was too honest not to show that she liked them. She blushed, and was all the prettier for it; but she did manage to deprecate the sentiments of the better known of her critics.

"Mr. Grossman is crazy," she modestly observed.

"About you he is," said Mrs. Légère; "and," she added, "I doo't blame him.—But look here"—she placed a crooked forefinger under the girl's chin and turned the blushing face upward—"look here, what a tired little woman it is!—Max, you're so careless, I'll bet you've never thought to give this poor child a drop of wine to strengthen her after all that traveling!"

"I tried to get her to," said Max, "but she vouldn't take it."

"What?"

"I don't drink," explained Mary.

"Of course you don't, but," Mrs. Légère elucidated, "taking a glass or two of wine after a railroad ride isn't drinking."

"No-o," Mary granted; "but I don't care for it."

"I hope not—only taken this way it's medicine. I don't blame you for not drinking in a restaurant with a bad boy like Max; but you need it now; you're all played out. This is as good as your home till to-morrow, you know. Just have a little with me; I'm old enough to be your mother, and we won't give Max a drop—just to punish him.—Cassie!"

She had run through the speech with a rapidity that had left the girl no chance for reply, and now, before Mary could move her lips, she had, with amazing agility, leaped to a back door, opened it, called an order into the darkness beyond, and as quickly returned to her former position on the sofa.

"It will be the best thing in the world for you," she said. "The doctor orders it for me, and so I always have it ready on ice."

As she concluded speaking, the door through which she had called was reopened and there entered a tall, raw-boned, glum, colored girl, whose shining ebony skin was darkened by the white apron that she wore. She bore a tray on which was a gilt-topped bottle and two narrow glasses.

"Put it there, Cassie," said Mrs. Légère, pointing to the table.

The girl obeyed and left the room. Max seized the bottle, ripped off the gilding and, wrapping his purple-bordered handkerchief about the neck, with one dexterous twist, drew out the resounding cork.

A living foam gushed from the neck as the self-appointed butler poured into the two glasses a pale gold fluid, which creamed angrily to their edges, and then subsided until first one addition and then another set them boiling again.

Mrs. Légère took a glass in each hand and pressed the foremost into the passive palm of the girl.

"Well," said she, in a phrase new to Mary, "here we are."

Mary hesitated, the glass to her lips. She could hear the liquid whispering to her, and particles seemed to jump from it and sting her eyes.

"What is it?" she asked.

"Vine," said Max.

"But what kind of wine?" she weakly delayed.

"My dear," her entertainer informed her, "there is only one kind of wine in New York."

"It's tchampagne," hissed Max, as if the name were something too sacred to be spoken in the tone of ordinary conversation. "Un' this kind costs eighd dollars a bottle."

The words and the connotation had their lure. Champagne—she had heard of it as the beverage of the rich; and eight dollars for one bottle—the price of two winter dresses!

"Come on," smiled Mrs. Légère.

The girl still hesitated.

"Here's to the wedding!" prompted the hostess, and drank the entire contents of her glass.

Mary took a mouthful and swallowed it. At first she nearly choked. Then the fiery liquid brought fresh tears to her blue eyes, still smarting from the gas that had, a moment before, assailed them. But finally, there began to spread through her weary body a grateful glow, and, half in apology for what she feared had been a clownish exhibition, she looked up with red lips pleasantly parted.

"Now, wasn't I right?" inquired Mrs. Légère. "Don't you feel better already?"

"I—I believe I do, thank you," Mary admitted. "Anyhow, it is pretty good, I guess—when you get used to it."

She took, bravely and with an ease now gained by experience, a second drink, and, as she held the glass before her, Max gallantly replenished it.

A bell rang and the glum, ebony maid passed through the room, closing both doors behind her.

Mary, alarmed at this nocturnal interruption, started a little, but neither of her companions seemed to regard the incident as unusual.

"You look much better," Mrs. Légère asseverated. "Finish that glass, dearie, and you'll be all to the good again."

"Do you think I'd better take so much?"

Both Max and Mrs. Légère laughed unaffectedly.

"Vhy, there ain't enough here to hurt a baby," declared the former.

Mary accepted the assurance. She did not like the taste of the champagne, but she knew now that she had been very tired, and the wine sent fresh life and energy through her sleepy limbs. She emptied the glass and felt, joyfully, all her fears and regrets slipping for her. Doubt and difficulty were resolved into a shimmering mist, were overcome, were forgotten.

The black maid thrust her head in at the hall-doorway.

Mrs. Légère rose.

"Excuse me," she said, leaving the room. "I'll be right back."

Max, the instant she was gone, rose in his turn.

"I'm going to fool her," he said. "I'm going to graft her drink!"

He took the glass that his hostess had placed upon the table, poured more of the wine into it, replenished the glass of his now unresisting companion and sat down by her side, his arm stretched behind her.

Mary, with refreshed courage, broke the silence. She was feeling like a naughty child triumphantly successful in her naughtiness.

"Do you know, Max," she said, "I gave a jump when that bell rang? I thought for a minute they might be after us."

"Nix on that," chuckled Max. "They couldn't catch us if they tried. Here's to the runavays!"

They clinked glasses and drank.

"I guess," the young man pursued, "it was chust von of Rosie's boarders."

"Her boarders? Does she run a boarding-house?" There was a note of dignified scorn in Mary's climbing voice.

"Sure she keeps boarders."

"But I——" Mary hesitated. She was tasting wine for the first time in her life, she had been tired and nerve-wracked, and now, though thoughts danced through her mind with unfamiliar rapidity, utterance seemed to her suddenly, and somewhat amusingly, to have become too clumsy to keep pace with them. "I thought," she elaborately persisted, "that—you—said—she—was rich."

"She is," said Max; "only she's got a big house she can't all use herself. Lots of people fill their houses that vay in N'York."

Mary started to formulate a reply that came glistening along the dim horizon of her mind; but just then there was a light tap at the door.

"Come in!" called Max, and Mrs. Légère re-entered.

The precaution of her hostess forced a smile from Mary.

"Why did you knock?" she asked.

But Mrs. Légère shook her corn-colored locks wisely.

"I don't ever disturb lovers," she said.

She sat down opposite the pair she was addressing and, without noticing that Max had appropriated her glass, discovered a fresh one on the mantelpiece, poured herself a mouthful of the wine and then decanted the rest for Mary.

She had just put down the empty bottle when the bell rang a second time.

"Good Lord," she sighed, "there it goes again! These people will be the death of me, losing their keys and coming in at all hours. Never mind, Cassie," she called through the rear door, "I'll go myself!" And then, to Mary, she concluded: "I'll attend to this and then I'll come right back and send Max home and show you to your room."

She left them seated on the sofa, Max's dark hand encircling the soft, young fingers of the girl as gently as if he had been a rustic wooer.

"Shall I go graft another bottle from the kitchen?" he asked, grinning impishly.

Mary shook her russet head.

"Not for me," she said; "I guess I've had enough."

Max again refrained from insistence. Instead, he remained beside her, and fell once more into the story that she had learned best to like,—the beautiful pictures of the wonderful city, of the work-free life that she should lead there, and of their marriage on the fast approaching morning.

Gradually, as his voice ran smoothly on, the words he was then saying became confused in her brain with other words that he had said earlier in the evening. Her eyelids grew heavy. The mood of exhilaration passed, and a weariness far more compelling than that from which she had previously suffered stole upon her. Mrs. Légère was absent for an unconscionable time. The girl yawned.

"I wonder when she's comin' back," said Mary, "I'm—I'm awful tired."

Max's hand slipped to her unresisting head and pressed it down upon his shoulder. He had not yet so much as kissed her, and he did not kiss her now.

"Don't vorry about her," he said softly. "You're tired out. Chust close your eyes for a minute, Mary, un' I'll vake you vhen she comes."

His shoulder was very comfortable. She closed her blue eyes.

"You will wake me?" she murmured.

"Sure I vill," said Max. "I'll have you clean avake before she's through knockin'."

But he must have forgotten that promise, for when Mrs. Légère at last returned, he was still sitting there among the pillows, Mary's hair fallen over his green coat, her cheeks pinker than ever, and her girlish breast rising and falling rhythmically in sleep.

IV AWAKENING

Clinging to a gigantic pendulum, Mary was swept through a mighty curve of roaring darkness, up from the black chasm of insensibility, and tossed, swaying over that frightful cliff, to the precipitous crag of consciousness. For what seemed many minutes, she tottered on the verge, dizzy, afraid. Then white knives, swift and sharp, slashed at her eyes and forced up the lids.

Defying closed blinds and drawn chintz curtains, the sunlight of noonday beat upon her face. She pulled something between her cheek and the leaping rays. Her hand trembled.

At first she could neither think nor recollect. The blows of an ax, regular, tremendous, were splitting her head. Her throat was hot and dry and choking. Her stomach crawled and leaped with nausea. From head to foot she was shaking with recurrent nervous chills that wracked a body of which every muscle was strained and sore.

Realization of the present came slowly, but it preceded all memory of the past. She found that the thing with which she had instinctively shaded her eyes was a sheet, and, as she lowered it, she saw, in a glance where the employment of sight was a separate pain, that she was lying among large pillows in a big brass bed, heavily mattressed. Beyond the foot of the bed her survey could not extend, because the foot was high and hung with a pink and green down quilt; but between two windows against the wall to her right, she saw a bureau, bearing a few scant toilet articles, and opposite, on the left, there was a washstand with a basin on the floor before it and, on its top, a pitcher, a soap-tray, a small brown bottle, and a little blue box bursting with white cotton.

This was not the room in which she had first fallen asleep.

With that isolated fact flashing like a message of disaster through her brain, she sat suddenly upright in the bed; but the room pitched before her like a boat in the trough of a storm on the river at home. A wave of sickness hissed over her, and she sank back among pillows repellantly scented.

Vaguely she realized that she must be in a room somewhere above the ground floor. Dimly she began to wonder how she had got up the stairs. What would the kindly Mrs. Légère think of her condition? And that which had happened—had it lasted for an hour or a night?

That which had happened—there memory, in a blinding blast, reasserted itself. What had been but half-wittingly accepted was now wholly known. Hot irons were branding upon her brain the full history of all that had occurred: the deeds for which she had at last learned the name, and the deeds that, even in her own frightened soul, were nameless. There was nothing—nothing of her, hand and foot, and mouth and eye and soul—that was not defiled.

For herself, for Max, but most of all for the hideous facts of life, she shook in physical disgust. Before the face of such things, what must birth and marriage mean? She opened her eyes, but she could not look at her silent witnesses; she shut her lids, but she saw, behind them, the hairy arms of a gorilla closing on her, to break her and bear her away. For one moment, all that she had loved she hated, and for the next, seizing his smiling reassurance as the one vow that could legalize what nothing could refine, all that she had come to hate she tried to force herself to love.

She understood now so much that she had never understood before: the whispered words of town gossip, the stray glimpses of lovers in the summer lanes, the cautions and the commands that had once so galled her in her home.

At the word, her mind swung back to far-away yesterday. She was sorry that she had been the cause—for she had been the cause—of the spilling of the stew. She was sorry that she had been so sharp with Sallie. She wished that she had washed the dishes less unwillingly. She still feared—she more than ever feared—the swaying bulk of masculinity that had been her father, but she began to see in him the logical result of forces that were themselves, as yet, beyond her ken; and she looked with a new and pitying vision upon the picture of her little, work-worn and care-marked mother stooping over the polished kitchen-stove.

Her breast tossed and her throat throbbed; but she was beyond tears. Painfully, slowly, yet with resolution, she struggled back to her sitting-posture in the bed.

In this position she found herself facing a long mirror hung against the opposite wall, and in the mirror she saw what was herself. With a low cry, she pulled loose the sheet and covered her nakedness.

That done, she looked again at the strange face that fronted her: a face the more strange because it was the intimate become alien, a ruin, an accusation. Framed in a tangle of dank hair, the cheeks, once pink, were chalky now, and splotched with red, the mouth that she had known only as full and firm, was loose and twisted; the eyes that had been blue, now circled with black, burned in blood-shot fields like coals of angry fire.

One impulse alone directed her: to find her clothes; to put them on; to return, as far as the mask of appearances would take her, to the self that she had been. In spite of aching head and quivering hands, she wrapped the sheet about her and, with infinite care, got from the bed. The floor seemed to sweep up to meet her, but she steadied herself against the wall and, each timid stride a separate agony, began to stumble about the room.

She looked for a clothes-closet or wardrobe, but there was neither. The only door was the door of exit, and the nearest chair was empty. In a corner she saw a pile of linen: laboriously she stooped and picked it up, unrolled a portion, and then, gasping in horror, tossed it away. On the other chair there lay a long kimona of crimson. She lifted it and found, neatly arranged below, a sheer cambric garment edged with coarse lace, two black silk stockings slashed with red, and a pair of slippers, high-heeled, with buckles of brass—for no reason that she could have formulated, the sight sickened her. She went to the bureau and tugged at its drawers, but all that she found was a single brown bottle, like that she had first observed on the washstand, filled with white tablets and labeled "Poison." Obviously, her clothes had been taken from the room.

In a panic of shame, she groped blindly for the door: she must call for Mrs. Légère. She grasped the knob and turned it—the door was locked.

Fear, mad and unreasoning, drove its spurs into her sides. Forgetting her nausea, heedless of her pain, she ran first to one window and then to the other, but the bowed shutters, though they admitted the light, would open for nothing beside: they were fastened with riveted loops of brass, and, looking through the small space between them, she could catch only a glimpse of the street far below. She tried to argue that the key might have fallen from the lock within the room, but she could not find it, and, the sheet dropping from her shoulders, she began to rattle at the knob, and then to pound upon the panels, her voice rising swiftly from a low call to a high, hysterical, frantic cry for help.

"Mrs. Légère! Mrs. Légère! Mrs. Légère!" she cried, and then as suddenly ceased, tilted against the door, and collapsed into a naked heap upon the floor.

All power of movement seemed to have slipped from her, but when there came a heavy footfall on the stair, a swish of skirts outside and the loud rasping of a key inserted in the lock, Mary leaped galvanically to her feet, gathered the sheet about her body, and flung herself upon the bed.

The door opened and closed behind Rose Légère, who promptly relocked it and slipped the key into the swelling bosom but half concealed by her dragon-spotted, baby-blue negligé.

"What in hell's the matter with you?" she demanded.

A little more rotund of figure, a little looser in the cheeks, and more patently crayoned and powdered about the eyes, a little more obviously painted and a little older, she was still the woman of the brewery's advertisement. But her forehead was knotted in deep, angry wrinkles; her under jaw was thrust so far forward that the roll of fat beneath it was invisible, and her eyes snapped with malice.

Mary shrank back among the pillows.

"Weren't you yellin'?" persisted Rose. "Did you lose your voice doin' it? What in the hell's the matter with you, I say?"

With a sweep of her stout arm, she seized the girl's bare shoulder and shook it till Mary's teeth clicked like castanets.

"I'm not goin' to have any such racket in my house!" the woman asseverated, as she plied her punishment. "You've got to learn first-off to keep your mouth to yourself, and be dead sure if you don't I'll give you a real beatin'."

She tossed Mary from her, as if her victim had been a bundle of straw, and stood up again, arms akimbo, breathing scarcely beyond her normal speed.

Mary was half mad and wholly sick with dread. She wanted to cry out for rescue and dared not. She wanted to rise and try to force the door or break open the shutters, but she could not move. She could only lie there panting for breath, with her mouth gasping and her heart hammering at her breast. She had closed her eyes. She opened them just in time to see Rose, whose slippered foot had touched something on the floor, stoop, pick up, and place beside the key in her bosom, a crumpled purple-bordered handkerchief.

"Now then," said the woman in a tone that, if still hard, was at least less intense than its predecessor, "try to tell me what's the trouble, like somebody this side of Matteawan."

With a supreme lunge at courage, Mary got her voice.

"I want my clothes," she said dully. "And where's Max?"

"Your clothes ain't fit to wear," said Rose; "an' I don't know where Max is. What you need is breakfast."

"I want my clothes," monotonously repeated Mary. "I couldn't eat to save my life. Hasn't Max come back?"

But Rose did not seem to hear the question.

"Nonsense, honey," she said, her anger seeming now entirely passed. "Of course you must eat. I got up on purpose for it, and I've set that nigger cooking a perfect peach of a breakfast."

"I want my clothes."

Rose leaned over the bed and put a soothing hand upon her questioner's fevered forehead.

"Now don't lose your nerve, dearie," she advised. "I'm your friend—honest, I am. You rest awhile and eat a little, and then maybe we'll talk things over."

"He hasn't come yet?"

"No, he hasn't. But why are you lettin' that jar you? Perhaps he's sick, too. Perhaps he's had some kind of a scrap with his old man. How do I know what's hit him? He'll show up all right in the end and, till he does show up, you just make yourself at home here and don't bother. I'll take care of you."

Something in the woman's solicitude—or it may have been the quick and unexplained change from violence to tenderness—frightened Mary even more than the initial outburst had frightened her.

"I want to go home," she quavered.

"Sure you want to go home," Rose acquiesced, without moving a muscle. "But how can you go? Max told me you'd sent your people a note saying you'd hiked out with him to be married, and how can you go home until he gets back here and you can take him along and show the goods?"

Her tone was lightly argumentative, but it was also stolidly merciless, and it hurled true to its mark the shaft of conviction. Out of the yesterday, Mary heard the voice of her father that was the voice of a society rigidly shaped by the conditions of its own fashioning:

"Bay 'un thirty year old an' noot another sin ag'in 'un, I would beat 'un within a bare inch o' 'er deeth, an' turn 'un oot to live the life 'un had picked fur herself!"

She understood that statement now.

"I can go to Max's," she hazarded.

"To—where?"

"To Max's father's."

"Maybe you can; but it's a long trip to Hungary."

Mary answered nothing. Rose had only confirmed what the girl had for an hour feared.

"You see how it is," pursued Rose, reading Mary's silence with a practiced mind. "Better let me take care of you."

Mary's face was hidden. Again she felt New York as a malevolent consciousness, a living prison implacably raising around her its insurmountable walls. There was, she thought, nothing left her but the diminishing hope of Max's return.

"Now you will eat, won't you?" Rose was continuing.

Mary shook her head.

Rose patted quietly one of the clenched hands that lay close to her.

"Better do it, dearie," she said. "I'm your friend; remember that. You can have whatever you want."

Mary mastered what strength remained to her. She raised herself on her elbow.

"Then let me go!" she pleaded, extending an open palm like a beggar asking for a crust. "I don't care if my clothes is mussed. I don't care what'll happen afterward. Just let me go!"

"You're a fool," Rose made cool rejoinder. "Where'd you go?"

"I don't know?"

"What'd become of you?"

"I don't care."

"Well, you would care, all right, all right. You can't go home, and you've no clothes and no money and no references. You couldn't get work anywhere in New York, and you couldn't get away from New York."

"I——" Mary groped through the darkness of her soul. "I can do housework."

"Not without a reference you can't."

"I could go to some office——"

"If you went to any charity-joint, they'd throw you out because of what's happened to you."

"I could beg on the street if I had to."

"Do you think the men in this town give money for nothing to a good-looking girl? You could go on the street, that's what you could do."

The phrase was new to its hearer, but the tone explained it.

"Then," she stumbled forward, "I could go to the police. They'd help me. I could——"

But at that word Rose flew into a torrent of anger and abuse that dwarfed the former tempest.

"You could, could you?" she cried. "That's your game, is it, you sneaking little innocent? I'll bet you're a damn sight wiser than you let on. But you don't know this town: you can take that much from me. Go to the police! Go to 'em! The cops on this beat are my friends: if you don't believe it, I'll bring 'em in and introduce you. They're my friends, and so's the whole precinct my friends. Go to 'em! Go to 'em, and I'll have you pinched and locked up for bein' what you are!"

Mary had drawn away from the blast, but Rose's powerful fist caught her under the chin and sent her crashing down on the bed.

"You don't come that on me!" the jailer continued. "You've got your choice: you can stay here and live easy, or walk out and go to jail, and that's all you can do. Max ain't comin' back, and you always knew he wouldn't come back. You know what this house is as well as I do, and you've got to stay here and earn your keep. If you give one yip I'll have the cops in! You don't want to eat, hey? Well then, you shan't eat! You can lay there and starve, or you can knock on the door and get the best breakfast you ever had, all ready for you. Do what you please; but if you let out one yip I'll hammer the life out of you!"

She turned and left the room. She banged the door behind her, and Mary, in a swirling dream, heard herself again locked in her cell.

V THE BIRDS OF PREY

Through all the days that immediately followed—the days that were nights, and the nights that were red noondays—a thousand horrors, from subtle word to recurring experience, conjoined to assure to Mary the reality of her servitude. All of that first day, after Rose had left her with the dark blood oozing from her cut chin upon the scented pillows, she lay, like a wounded dog, now in a faint and then in a stupor, on the disordered bed. As the sunlight shifted and the shadows lengthened in the room, torpor gave way to reawakened fear, and she crawled into a corner and tried to hide herself, trembling, with chattering teeth, at every sound of laughter that rose from the lower floors, at every footstep upon the stair.

Thrice Rose returned. Each time she bore a steaming dish that, as the girl's physical pain grew less, assailed the nostrils with increasing poignancy. Each time Mary shook her stubborn russet head. And each time the visit ended in a beating.

Escape by door or window was out of the question; to attempt to raise an alarm was to invite fresh violence; and gradually grew the certainty that the situation was genuinely as the jailer had described it: that the street was worse than the house, and that Mary was her own prisoner. She found the bottle labeled "Poison," and bit one of the tablets, but she was young and afraid, and she spat the burning crumbs from her mouth. She did not dare to die, and when Rose came again to the room, her captive was too weak to refuse the broth that was fed her, as if she were a sick child, from a spoon.

"You're a dear girl, after all," said the mistress, as she administered the grateful food. "You do as I say and you won't never be sorry. All I want is to have you sensible. I'm your friend."

Mary said nothing: she was too weak to answer.

"And now," Rose pursued, "I'll just give you a drink."

And when she had come back, she had not come back alone.

The worst of prisons is that in which the door is so cunningly closed upon the inmate that, at last, after the brutality is familiar, the inmate seems originally to have closed it upon herself, and in such a fortress of pain Mary now found herself restrained. The process was simple. It was merely first to wound and then to inure. The descent to hell is not easy; it is red with blood and wet with tears; but hell itself must be endured.

It was not for some days that any woman save Rose came to Mary's cell and then, one afternoon, two women followed the grating key.

They were alike only as to clothes. Both wore loose negligé garments, but whereas the one was sturdy and German-blonde, with straw-colored hair, round and heavy face, blue eyes and peasant frame—a younger Rose—the other was wiry, compact, her brows low and dark under somber hair, her full cheeks red only in defiance of a swarthy skin, her eyes black and her mouth vermillion. It was this one who, with an accent that a more sophisticated ear than Mary's would have placed along the Seine, was the first to speak.

"'Ello!" she laughed, her teeth gleaming between her lips like pomegranate seeds. "We have come to make the call."

Without awaiting a reply, she jumped upon the bed, drew her feet beneath her, and produced and lit a cigarette. The German girl moved more slowly to the other side and there elaborately ensconced herself.