al New York noise. The
slam-bang of the trains overhead, the grinding grunt of the surface
cars, the demon draymen, the clanging motors, the ceaseless crowds,
collaborate in an uproar beside which a bombardment is restful. But
though the entire thoroughfare is appalling, Jefferson Market, behind
which Gay street squats, is infernal.

Loftus loathed it. Until he pursued the girl into its horrors never
before had he been there. Nor, save for her, would he have returned.
But return he did. For recompense he beheld her. She was strolling
along, a roll of music under her arm, in the direction of Fifth
avenue.

It was there he attempted to accost her. Without deigning to seem even
aware that he had presumed to do so, she passed on and, in passing,
turned into Washington Square, where, ascending the steps of a house,
she vanished. It was then three by the clock of a beautiful day in
April.

Loftus was as well able as another to put two and two together. He
knew that young girls do not stroll about with a music roll under
their arm for the fun of it. A music roll predicates lessons, and
there where lessons are must also be a teacher.

From that teacher he was unaware of any good and valid reason why he
should not himself take lessons. But fate is not unrelenting. Of such
toil he was spared. He spared himself too any further toil that day.
He felt that he had done enough. He had quarried the girl again,
stalked her to what was obviously a boarding-house. He turned on his
heel.

The next day he was back at that house, inquiring at the door. As a
result he was shown into a shabby back parlor where he made the
acquaintance of Mme. Machin, a tired old Frenchwoman, who, with rouge
on her yellow cheeks, powder on her pointed nose, confided to him that
she had been prima donna, though whether _assoluta_ or _dissoluta_ she
omitted to state.

But her antecedents, her possibilities as well, Loftus divined at a
glance and, while he was at it, divining too, that, personally, she
was no better, and, financially, no better off than the law allows,
asked point-blank about the Miss Cohen who had come there at three the
day before. Learning then from the ex-first lady that the girl's name
was not Cohen but Durand, he damned the apothecary and offered a
hundred dollars to be introduced. Poverty is not a crime. But it is
rumored to be an incentive. The crime which Loftus proposed to Mme.
Machin is one which the code does not specify and t