She was not afraid. The blood was rocking in her veins like a sea, and she was raging with an anxiety that mounted as the heliotrope dusk, turping out sky lines, began to blow in like fog through the narrowness of the cross streets.

But neither was she alone. That was the miracle of her state. That peculiar living magnetism was through the blanket she carried and in a current along her arm. A lusty little storm of crying rose once, quite suddenly, and she kissed down into the pink little mouth that was full of the breath of life—her life.

There were three bottles of still warm milk in her bag. She fumbled for one, kneeling right there on the sidewalk, jerking out the stopper with her teeth and fitting on the rubber nipple. The little lips closed over it with the pull and strong insuck of breath which never failed to thrill her.

She was sobering, though, slowly and surely into a state of panic. At Broadway the swirl of the dinner-bound was already tightening. Lights began to pop out in the tall, narrow office and loft buildings of the vertical city.

She boarded an uptown car, counting, and truly enough, upon the chivalry of the mob toward her burden, for obtaining an immediate seat. At West Fifty-third Street she alighted into a day gone two shades darker. A stiffening breeze blew in from the river, whipping up the odor of garbage from curbs. A group of dirty children were building a bonfire of some of these slops and bits of flying paper, lending a certain vicious redness to the scene.

She thought suddenly of Page Avenue at this hour of pinkish mist. The little patch of front porch with the green chairs and tan-linen covers.

"O God, what have I done!"

The window with the midwife's sign was dark and there was a little coagulation of bareheaded women on the steps. They parted to give her passage, their babel immediately resuming after her.

The hot, sour smells of the hallway smothered her, but she fumbled for the bell, plunging her hand into the damp, clinging gauze of a cobweb that sent her back shuddering. What proved to be Mrs. Landman herself opened the door upon a rushing smell of hops and a cookery and a glimpse of violently disordered interior. It was not so much the furiously stained figure that sent Lilly a step backward, but a black flap tied over one eye and knotted at the back of her head struck her as so unutterably sinister that without a word she turned and, with her head charging the way for her, ran out through the hallway, through the group on the stoop, and the entire length of the block, catching a downtown surface car that stopped for her after it had started.

She was palpitating with the kind of fear that gave her a sense of fleeing through a dark corridor with some one at her heels, and so rode on until her breath caught up and she could relax into a grateful sort of inertia.

At Forty-second Street, on a sudden impulse, she left the car, hurrying into Grand Central Station. In its undress of semicompletion, the swirl of home-going commuters caught her, so that she was swept down a temporary runway and shunted finally into the waiting room. At its far end the "Matron" sign still hung at right angles. She hurried to it, and to her relief was met by a new face above the gray-and-white uniform, rather little and old and framed kindly in white. There was a small boy asleep on the couch this time, and the usual frowsily tired traveling public relaxed against various of the chairs.

"I want to leave my baby here until I get in touch with friends who have failed to meet me."

A quick suspicion of foundling crossed the old face.

"We don't take the responsibility of infants."

"But this is urgent. I must locate my friends in Brooklyn. I cannot find them in the telephone book and evidently they have not received my telegram."

"We don't do it."

Then Lilly went gallantly down to her last handful of change, all but a ten-cent piece.

"She's the best little thing. Sleeps the night through. I've two bottles of prepared food here in my bag. Her next feeding time is at ten and her next at six—"

"We don't keep infants for nothing like that long, madam. I go off duty at seven and—"

"I haven't any intention of leaving her that long, just until I get in touch with my friends."

With the mound of change ingratiated into the old palm and the little bundle transferred to arms more or less reluctantly held out for it, Lilly lifted back a corner of the blanket.

"Wait until nice lady sees mother's beautiful, then she'll be glad to watch over her."

Mysteriously, it seemed to Lilly, there was nothing of the button nose so peculiar to infants about her child. Its was tipped with character; so, too, the little mouth in the firm way it had of closing.

"Say, but ain't she a beauty!" capitulated the matron.

"Isn't she! Isn't she!"

"Look at them curls. You ought to enter her in a show, ma'am."

"You will see to her carefully until I return, won't you? She sleeps that way always, sweetly and deeply."

"Why, I'll sit and rock her myself this very minute."

When Lilly went out into the darkness there were the ten cents in her bag and the blurry outline of things she finally laid to hunger. She walked downward for some blocks, finally entering a Third Avenue lunch room and ordering a ten-cent bowl of beef stew. She took it from a tablespoon like a thick soup, its warmth flowing through her and dissipating a chilly discomfort. But her face still felt rather drawn, and, regarding herself in the pink net-draped mirror, she took to rubbing her cheeks, an old, schoolgirl device against pallor. She was quite becomingly large-eyed from the deadly aching tiredness that lay over her, but otherwise the old whiteness of her skin flowed unmarred and intact, also that unadorned look of nun to her face where the hair left it so cleanly.

Beside her at one of the marble-topped tables a great, hefty motorman in uniform kept finding out her knee and pressing it.

"Stop it," she said, "or I'll call the proprietor."

He drew surlily back, draining his thick cup of coffee and shambling out, chewing a toothpick. At the door he looked back with his lips pulled down, mouthing a filthy epithet at her.

After a while she followed, almost slunk, with a sense of no tip left beneath the saucer, her pace swinging into the indefinable tempo of destination, but more and more indeterminate as she approached Madison Square.

She kept close to Third Avenue, something reassuring in the sidewalk gabble, the air of cheap carnival, the white arc lights over open fruit stands, and the percussive roar of Elevated trains. Presently even Third Avenue would withdraw to over its shops, the sidewalks fall quiet and darken, pedestrians become sinister. She shivered against that lateness; stood for a period outside a bird store, watching a pair of Japanese mice chase their little eternities in a wheel cage. At Twenty-third Street a youth with a prison complexion, a cap pulled down and a sweater pulled up, sauntered out of a pool room, matching his pace with hers, and at once easily colloquial.

"Hello, sweetness!"

Her eyebrows shot up. She could smell, feel, and taste the cheap beer on his breath, and anger rather than fear possessed her.

"Cat got your tongue, sweetness? Where you goin'? Lonesome?"

After a while he fell back, flecked off as it were like a burr clutching for a metal surface.

It was her conviction, many times put to test, that such situations lay within her shaping, and that man took his cue from the yea or nay of her attitude.

At the sight of a crowd tightening about a street corner she edged her way in. The iron plug to a corner sewer had been removed, a policeman and the shirt-sleeved figure of a man prone on the ground, red-faced and arms inserted their length.

"What is it?" asked Lilly, tiptoeing.

"A feller's gold watch rolled down."

"Who'll go down on a rope?" called out the owner.

"I will," cried Lilly.

The crowd turned its face to her.

"I will, for a hundred and fifty dollars—now—here!"

In the derision and boo that went up she escaped, hurrying this time and without uncertainty.

The Union Square Family Theater showed the lighted but quiet front of a performance in progress.

At the stage entrance the old doorman with his look of sea dog recognized her, admitting her with a nod. The titter of music came back through the wings and quick, loud thumps of a tumbling act in progress. The smell of grease paint, like the flop of a cold, wet hand to her face, smote her with a familiarity out of all proportion to her limited experience in the theater.

She wound, unchallenged, up the short spiral staircase.

Through an open doorway of an office that had been refurnished in large mahogany desk, filing case, and a stack of sectional bookcases, Robert Visigoth sat tilted on a swivel chair, his hands locked at the back of his head, gaze and cigar toward the ceiling.

She stood in the doorway a second, watching his perceptions dawn.

"Hel-lo!" he said, finally, uncrossing a knee grown slightly corpulent and his rather small eyes crinkling to slits. "Hel-lo!"

She was arch and laughed back.

"A bad penny, you see."

He swung a chair toward her without rising.

"Turned up, didn't you? Good."

She seated herself, with that coquetry of hers which she could force on occasion, feeling his glance as it ran over her dawning shabbiness as searingly as a flame. It darted on downward to her feet, and because that very day the leather in her right shoe had cracked, showing a grin of white lining, she wound that foot up around the chair rung.

"I took sick—that time," she explained, fatuously.

He lifted her hand, bending back each finger to match his words.

"You are a naughty girl. Why did you run away?"

She sat swallowing through obvious gulps, but increasingly determined to be arch.

"Please—don't," trying to withdraw her hand.

"Come now," he said through a half smile and watching her redden almost to purple, "you don't hate me that badly or you wouldn't be back here."

"I know I don't."

"What?"

"Hate you."

"Good! Now we're getting on."

"I need something, Mr. Visigoth—terribly."

"We're not using that song specialty any more," he said, kindly.

"I've given up that sort of thing, too, Mr. Visigoth. I'm a stenographer now."

"Smartest thing you ever did."

"I—I'm in a little difficulty right now—a money one. That's why I thought if you—Could you use me in the office? I know stenography and typewriting. I—It would be a godsend, Mr. Visigoth. I dislike having to put it so strongly—but my present difficulty is serious—very."

"What's troubling you?"

"I must have an office position. I want my evenings free and I cannot be situated so that I might have to go on the road at any time."

"Married?"

"Why, I—I thought—assumed that you knew I was married from the beginning. I—We aren't together, though; haven't been—"

"Umph!"

"It's just that I'm temporarily embarrassed."

"That was a pretty rough way you left me in the lurch. Those actions don't get a girl very far in this business."

"It was sickness."

He leaned forward to pat her hand, his lids somehow seeming to thicken.

"You're a queer little duck," he said, "but I like you. Always have."

"Then you will, Mr. Visigoth?"

"Well, let's not bother about that now."

"But—"

"There is quite a change taking place in these offices. My brother is coming from Chicago to take charge of the booking end and I am going out there after he comes on, and I'll see if he can use you. Let us talk about you now."

"No. No. I haven't made you understand. That isn't all. I'm in immediate need. So immediate! I need as much as—as a hundred and fifty—two hundred—here, now, to-night!"

"Whew!"

"It is so difficult to explain, but if you would. If you could! I will work it out for you, beginning tomorrow morning. To the last penny. Two hundred dollars advance on any salary you may see fit to pay me, if you would! I'm not afraid to start small. Within a week I'll prove my value to you—that's how I'll slave for advancement. Just two hundred dollars advance on my salary—one hundred and fifty if—"

"Well, well, well," he said, stropping up and down the back of her hand, "that does put a different face on things, doesn't it? I just don't know what to say."

"Say yes. It is only my predicament gives me the courage to ask. But I need money, Mr. Visigoth. Need it. Need it. Now—to-night! I'll pay it back in service. I—"

"Come now," he said, his eyes crinkling again. "You don't mean that,
Lilly. I'm a man and you're a woman. I don't want your money."

"I'll go any length for yours."

"What length?"

"Any—you say."

He leaned forward at that and kissed down into her lips so deeply that her neck was strained backward to hurting. She sprang to her feet, wiping her hand across her mouth until her lips dragged, but trying to laugh.

"You hurt."

"That's what I want to do—hurt, hurt," kissing down into and crushing her lips again and again.

"Oh! oh! oh!" she moaned rather than cried, pummeling at his chest.

"Devil," he said, jerking her back to him until the breath jumped from her.

"I—I hate you!"

"Good!"

"I'm not what you think I am. I hate you. I hate—sex. I—"

"I don't care what I think you are. I only know that I want to be the one to wake you up to the knowledge that sex is life and life is sex. Ice maid. I don't care what you are. I know that I like you. I know that I like your lips. Give me."

"Quick, then," she said, trying not to shudder.

* * * * *

She squirmed from him finally, pushing against him with all her strength.

"Ugh. How I—I—hate—"

"Gad! how I like your lips!"

"Let me go now."

He looked down at her through slits of eyes.

"To the last cent, you said."

"Yes."

"Come, then," he said. "I live alone."

"Please," she said, her palm pat against her mouth and looking at him with streaming eyes. "Please—not that—"

For answer he kissed her again so brutally that she sat down, moaning her shame.

"You're a woman of the world, Lilly. You don't want anything for nothing. Life wouldn't balance up that way."

"But I'll—"

"Yes, yes, I'm going to give you a position, too. Fifteen a week to start with, to show you I mean well by you. You beautiful sleepy-eyed thing!"

"I'm not what you think—"

"All right, I know. Never again after to-night, so help me God! This isn't my kind of thing any more than it is yours. Any position you want in this office to-morrow morning and me off to Chicago for permanent headquarters next month. I'm good pay. Are you? Now? To-night?"

"My hundred and fifty—"

"Two hundred!"

"Yes—I'm good pay—now—to-night!"