ew hat.

She sobbed in her throat and made a cup of her hands to halloo; but her
voice would not come, and she ran faster.

A policeman glanced after her and struck asphalt. A dog yapped at her
tall heels. Even as she sped, her face upturned and her mouth dry and
open, the figure swerved suddenly into a red-lighted doorway with a
crescent burning above it; and, with her eyes on that Mecca, she pulled
at her strength and gathered more speed.

The crescent grew in size and redness, and its lettering sprang out; and
suddenly she stopped, as suddenly as an engine jerking up before a
washout.

CRESCENT POOL AND BILLIARD ROOM--
OPEN ALL NIGHT

And her heart folded inward like the petals of a moonflower.

Stretched to the limit of their resilience, the nerves act reflexly. The
merest second of incertitude, and then automatically she swung about,
turned her blood-driven face toward the place from whence she came and
groped her way homeward as Polymestor must have groped after being
blinded in the presence of Hecuba.

Tears hot from the geyser of shame and pain magnified her eyes like
high-power spectacle-lenses; and when she reached the dim entrance of
the cliff dwelling she called home an edge of ice stiffened round her
heart and her feet would not enter.

A silhouette lurched round a black corner and zigzagged toward her, and
she held herself flat as a lath against the building until it and its
drunken song had lurched round another corner; a couple hurried past
with interlinked arms; their laughter light as foam. More
silhouettes--a flat-chested woman, who wore her shame with the conscious
speciousness of a prisoner promenading in his stripes; a loutish fellow,
who whistled as he hurried and vaulted up the steps of the Electric
Institute three steps at a bound; an old man with an outline like a
crooked finger; a shawled woman; a cab lined with vague faces, and
streamers of laughter floating back from it; and, standing darkly
against the cold wall, Essie, with the tears drying on her cheeks, and
her whole being suddenly galvanized by a new thought.

A momentary lull in the drippy streamlet of pedestrians; she leaned out
into the darkness and peered up, then down the aisle of street. A shadow
came gliding toward her, and she stepped forward; but when the
street-lamp fell on the cold eyes and cuttlefish stare she huddled back
into her corner until the steps had receded like the stick-taps of a
blind