highway, presently finding herself lost in a congeries of
old-time streets of which she had never heard. Her only knowledge of
New York was of streets crossing each other at right angles, numbered,
prosaic, leaving no more play to the fancy than a sum in arithmetic.
Here the ways were narrow, the buildings tall, the night effects
fantastic. In the lamp light she could read signs bearing names as
unpronounceable as the gibbering monkey-speech in Lafayette Street.
Warehouses, offices, big wholesale premises, lairs of highly
specialized businesses which only the few knew anything about, offered
no place for human beings to sleep, and little invitation to the
prowler. Now and then a marauding cat darted from shadow to shadow,
but otherwise she was as nearly alone as she could imagine herself
being in the heart of a great city.

Still she went on and on. In the effort to escape this overpowering
solitude she turned one corner and then another, now coming out
beneath the elevated trains, now on the outskirts of docks where she
was afraid of sailors. She was afraid of being alone, and afraid of
the thoroughfares where there were people. On the whole she was more
afraid of the thoroughfares where there were people, though her fear
soon entered the unreasoning phase, in which it is fear and nothing
else. Still headed vaguely southward she zigzagged from street to
street, helpless, terrified, longing for day.

She was in a narrow street of which the high weird gables on either
side recalled her impressions on opening a copy of _Faust_,
illustrated by Gustave Dore, which she found on the library table in
East Sixty-seventh Street. On her right the elevated and the docks
were not far away, on the left she could catch, through an occasional
side street the distant gleam of Broadway. Being afraid of both she
kept to the deep canyon of unreality and solitude, though she was
afraid of that. At least she was alone; and yet to be alone chilled
her marrow and curdled her blood.

Suddenly she heard the clank of footsteps. She stopped to listen,
making them out as being on the other side of the street, and
advancing. Before she had dared to move on again a man emerged from
the half light and came abreast of her. As he stopped to look across
at her, Letty hurried on.

The man also went on, but on glancing over her shoulder to make sure
that she was safe she saw him pause, cross to her side of the street,
and begin to follow her. That h