can lave the sub-basement throb of temples and is filled with music with
a hum in it.

For two years and eight months of Saturday nights, each one of them a
semaphore dropping out across the gray road of the week, Gertie Slayback
and Jimmie Batch dined for one hour and sixty cents at the White
Kitchen. Then arm and arm up the million-candle-power flare of Broadway,
content, these two who had never seen a lake reflect a moon, or a slim
fir pointing to a star, that life could be so manifold. And always, too,
on Saturday, the tenth from the last row of the De Luxe Cinematograph,
Broadway's Best, Orchestra Chairs, fifty cents; Last Ten Rows,
thirty-five. The give of velvet-upholstered chairs, perfumed darkness,
and any old love story moving across it to the ecstatic ache of Gertie
Slayback's high young heart.

On a Saturday evening that was already pointed with stars at the
six-o'clock closing of Hoffheimer's Fourteenth Street Emporium, Miss
Slayback, whose blondness under fatigue could become ashy, emerged from
the Bargain Basement almost the first of its frantic exodus, taking the
place of her weekly appointment in the entrance of the Popular Drug
Store adjoining, her gaze, something even frantic in it, sifting the
passing crowd.

At six o'clock Fourteenth Street pours up from its basements, down from
its lofts, and out from its five-and-ten-cent stores, shows, and
arcades, in a great homeward torrent--a sweeping torrent that flows full
flush to the Subway, the Elevated, and the surface car, and then spreads
thinly into the least pretentious of the city's homes--the five flights
up, the two rooms rear, and the third floor back.

Standing there, this eager tide of the Fourteenth Street Emporium, thus
released by the six-o'clock flood-gates, flowed past Miss Slayback.
White-nosed, low-chested girls in short-vamp shoes and no-carat gold
vanity-cases. Older men resigned that ambition could be flayed by a
yard-stick; young men still impatient of their clerkship.

It was into the trickle of these last that Miss Slayback bored her
glance, the darting, eager glance of hot eyeballs and inner trembling.
She was not so pathetically young as she was pathetically blond, a
treacherous, ready-to-fade kind of blondness that one day, now that she
had found that very morning her first gray hair, would leave her ashy.

Suddenly, with a small catch of breath that was audible in her throat,
Miss Slayback stepped out of that doorway, squ