omen shrugged impatient shoulders
in their warm cloaks and stopped to arrange their skirts for a walk
through the storm. People having been comparatively silent for two
hours burst into a roar of conversation, their hearts still kindling
from the glowings of the stage.

The pavements became tossing seas of umbrellas. Men stepped forth to
hail cabs or cars, raising their fingers in varied forms of polite
request or imperative demand. An endless procession wended toward
elevated stations. An atmosphere of pleasure and prosperity seemed to
hang over the throng, born, perhaps, of good clothes and of having just
emerged from a place of forgetfulness.

In the mingled light and gloom of an adjacent park, a handful of wet
wanderers, in attitudes of chronic dejection, was scattered among the
benches.

A girl of the painted cohorts of the city went along the street. She
threw changing glances at men who passed her, giving smiling
invitations to men of rural or untaught pattern and usually seeming
sedately unconscious of the men with a metropolitan seal upon their
faces.

Crossing glittering avenues, she went into the throng emerging from the
places of forgetfulness. She hurried forward through the crowd as if
intent upon reaching a distant home, bending forward in her handsome
cloak, daintily lifting her skirts and picking for her well-shod feet
the dryer spots upon the pavements.

The restless doors of saloons, clashing to and fro, disclosed animated
rows of men before bars and hurrying barkeepers.

A concert hall gave to the street faint sounds of swift, machine-like
music, as if a group of phantom musicians were hastening.

A tall young man, smoking a cigarette with a sublime air, strolled near
the girl. He had on evening dress, a moustache, a chrysanthemum, and a
look of ennui, all of which he kept carefully under his eye. Seeing
the girl walk on as if such a young man as he was not in existence, he
looked back transfixed with interest. He stared glassily for a moment,
but gave a slight convulsive start when he discerned that she was
neither new, Parisian, nor theatrical. He wheeled about hastily and
turned his stare into the air, like a sailor with a search-light.

A stout gentleman, with pompous and philanthropic whiskers, went
stolidly by, the broad of his back sneering at the girl.

A belated man in business clothes, and in haste to catch a car, bounced
against her shoulder. "Hi, there, Mary, I beg y