to her, and
terrifying. The very quietness of those few residential blocks,
marooned amid ever-rising tides of trade, had an ominous accent.
All the houses seemed to have drawn together, cheek by jowl, in secret
conference on her case, sloughing their disdainful daytime pose and
following her fugitive, guilty figure with open amusement and
contempt. Some (she thought) leered horribly at her, others scowled,
others again assumed a scornful cast; one and all pretended to a
hideous intelligence, as though they knew and, if they would, could
say what and why she fled.

It was as if the storm had been a supernatural visitation upon the
city, robbing it of every intimate, homely aspect, leaving it
inhumanly distorted in an obsession of abominable enchantment.

With the start of one suddenly delivered from dream-haunted sleep, she
found herself arrived at Forty-Second Street, and safe; none pursued
her, nothing in her manner proclaimed the new-fledged malefactor; she
need only observe ordinary circumspection to escape notice altogether.
And for several moments she remained at a complete standstill there on
the corner, blocking the fairway of foot traffic and blindly surveying
the splendid facade of Grand Central Station, spellbound in wonder at
the amazing discovery that Providence did not always visit incontinent
retribution upon the heads of sinners--since it appeared that she who
had sinned was to escape scot-free.

With this she was conscious of a flooding spirit of exultant
impenitence; the deadly monotony of her days was done with once and
for all. It mattered little that--since it were suicidal to return to
the studio, the first place the police would search for her--she was
homeless, friendless, penniless; it mattered little that she was
hungry (now that she remembered it) and had not even a change of
clothing for the morrow; these things would somehow be
arranged--whether by luck or by virtue of her wit--they _must!_

All that really mattered was that the commonplace was banished from
her ways, that she was alive, foot-loose and fancy-free, finally and
definitely committed to the career of an adventuress.

Paradoxically, she was appalled by contemplation of her amazing
callousness; outlawed, _declassee_, she was indifferent to her
degradation, and alive only to the joy of freedom from the bondage of
any certain social status.

Now as she lingered on the corner, people were passing her continually
on their way