retchedness
were pitchforked into one another's evil-smelling company, so that it
ranged from the highest circle of purgatory to the lowest depths of
hell.

"Why do you go to such places, Dick? It's nauseating," Madeline
exclaimed.

"Why?" he demanded. "I suppose that sometime, when I've made over my
information into the neat systematic package that you prefer, I shall
start a soul-uplifting row. I look forward to that as my career. You
ought to get a career, Madeline."

"A career? I know the verb, but not the noun," she retorted saucily.
"I'm afraid mine is nothing but the trivial task, flavored with all the
flavors I like best."

Sometimes, when they went home together at night, Percival had stories
to unfold to Norris alone--stories he could not tell Madeline, of things
found in the mire, upon which the healthy happy world turns its back
when every night it goes "up town" to pleasant hearthstones and to
normal life. These were tales of foul sounds and foul air, where men and
women gathered and drank and gambled and laughed with laughter that was
like the grinning of skulls, hollow and despairing. They were stories of
girls with sodden eyes and men with wooden faces--of innumerable schemes
to suck money by any means but those of honor. And these were the phases
of his study that Dick looked upon with a kind of anguished fascination,
as more and more he saw how the hands stretched out of that mire
smirched the city which he hoped to serve.

Sometimes, and this was when they were with Madeline again, Ellery would
have his experience to tell, redolent of printer's ink, and full of the
interest of that profession which is never two days the same--stories of
how business toils and spins and is not arrayed like Solomon. Norris,
too, was beginning to run up against human nature both in gross and in
detail, and to know the world, from the fight last night in Fish Alley
up to the doings of statesmen and kings. Madeline had little to tell,
for she was living quietly at home, taking the housekeeping off her
mother's hands and driving her father to the morning train. She had few
episodes more exciting than an afternoon call or a moonlight sail. But
the young men brought her their lives, and when she had made her gay
little bombardment of comment, they felt as though some new light had
fallen upon familiar facts. The very simplicity of her thought put
things in the right relation and gave the effect of a view from a higher