could. Then abruptly she twisted round and faced her persecutor.

Before her eyes, half blinded by rage and disgust, his face swam like the mask of an incubus—a blur of red flesh fixed in an insolent smirk.

She was dimly aware of curious glances lifting to the sound of her tremulous voice:

"Must I leave this car? Or will you let me alone?"

There was the pause of an instant; then she had her answer in a tone of truculent contempt:

"Ah, wha's the matter with you, anyhow?"

She choked, stammering, and looked round in despair. But the man at her elbow was grinning with open amusement, and another, seated beside her tormentor, was pretending to notice nothing, his nose buried in a newspaper.

"If y'u don't like the goin', sister, why doncha get off 'n' walk?"

This from him who had compelled that frantic protest.

With a lurch, the car stopped; and as it did so the girl turned impulsively, grasped the guard-rail, swung her lithe body between it and the floor of the car, and dropped to the cobbles between the tracks. She staggered a foot or two away, followed by an indistinguishable taunt amid derisive laughter. Fortunately there was no car bearing down on the southbound track to endanger her; while that which she had left flung away as, recovering, she ran to the sidewalk.

She began to trudge northward. The first street lamp she encountered told her she had alighted at Forty-seventh Street, and had another mile and a half to walk. But with all her weariness, she no longer thought of riding; it was impossible ... she could never escape annoyance ... men just wouldn't let her alone....

Men!...

Shuddering imperceptibly, her eyes hot with tears of shame and indignation, she walked rapidly, anxious to gain the refuge of her home, to be secure, for a time at least, from Man....

They called themselves Men! She despised them all—all! Beasts!... What had she ever done?... It wasn't as if this was the first time: they were always plaguing her: hardly a day passed.... Well, anyway, never a week.... It wasn't her fault if she was pretty: she never even so much as looked at them: but they kept on staring ... nudging.... She didn't believe there was a decent fellow living ... except, of course, That One....

He was different; at least, he had been, somehow: like a perfect gentleman. He had come between her and a gang of tormentors, had knocked one down and thrown the rest into confusion with a lively play of fists, and then, whisking Joan into a convenient taxicab, had taken her to the corner nearest her home—never so much as asking her name, or if he might call.... She had expected him to—like in a book; but he didn't, nor had he (likewise contrary to her expectations) at any time thereafter been known to haunt her neighbourhood. To her the affair was like a dream of chivalry: she remembered him as very handsome (probably far more handsome than he really was) and different, with grand clothes and manners (the man had helped her out of the cab and lifted his hat in parting): all in all, vastly unlike any of the fellows whose rude attentions she somewhat loftily permitted in the streets after supper or at the home of some other girl.

That One remained her dream-lord of romance. And in her heart of hearts she was sure that some day their paths would cross again. But it had all happened so long ago that she had grown a little faint with waiting.

So, smothering her indignation with roseate fancies, she plodded her weary way to Seventy-sixth Street; where, turning eastward, she presently ascended a squat brown-stone stoop, entered the dingy vestibule of a dingier tenement, pressed the button below a mail-box labelled "Thursby," waited till the latch clicked its spasmodic welcome, and then began her weary climb to the topmost floor.

II

The five flights of steps were long and steep and covered with a compound of fabric, grease, and dirt which, today resembling a thin layer of decayed rubber, had once been bright linoleum. There was no light other than a dejected dusk filtering down the wall from a grimy sky-light in the roof, a twilight lacking little of the gloom of night.

On each landing five doors opened—three toward the back, two toward the front of the building: most of them ajar, for purposes of ventilation and publicity. It was a question which was the louder, the clatter of tongues or the conflict of odours from things cooking and things that would doubtless have been the better for purification by fire.

At the top conditions were a little more endurable: and when Joan had shut behind her the door giving access to her home, the clatter and squalling came from below, a familiar and not unpleasant blend of dissonances. And within the smells were individual: chiefly of boiled cabbage and fried pork, with a feebly contending flavour of cheap tobacco-smoke.

She was in the dining-room of the Thursby flat. Behind it lay the kitchen; forward, three small cubicles successively denominated on the architect's plans as "bedchamber," "alcove," and "parlour." They were all, however, sleeping-rooms. The nearest was occupied by Joan's brother; the next, the alcove, contained a double-bed dedicated to Joan and her young sister; while the parlour held a curiosity called a folding-bed, which had long since ceased to fold, and on which slept Anthony Thursby and his wife.

Mrs. Thursby was now in the kitchen, preparing dinner with the assistance of her fifteen-year-old daughter, Edna. "Butch," the son of the house, was not at home.

Anthony Thursby sat at the dining-table, head bent over a ragged note-book and a well-thumbed collection of white and pink newspaper clippings.

It was the sight of him that checked Joan in her explicit intention. She had meant to enter dramatically to her mother, blurt out the news, with the cause, of her misfortune, and abandon herself to the luxury of self-pity soothed by sympathy. But she had also meant to have it understood that nobody was to tell "the Old Man"—at least not until she should have established herself in a new job. In short, she had not thought to find Thursby at home.

Hesitating beside the table, she removed the long pins from her hat while she stared with narrowed eyes at her father. She was wondering whether she hadn't better confess and have it out with him first as last. The only thing, indeed, that made her pause was the knowledge that there would be no living with him until she was once more "earning good money" behind a counter. And she was firmly determined not again to seek employment in a department store.

Regarding fixedly the round but unpolished bald head with its neglected fringe of grey hair, she asked herself if the bitterness in her heart for her father were in truth hatred or mere premonitory resentment of the opposition he would unquestionably set against her plans for the future....

He was a man of nearly fifty, who looked more, in spite of a tendency to genial corpulence. At thirty he had been a fair and handsome man; today his round red face was mottled, disfigured by a ragged grey moustache, discoloured by several days' growth of scrubby beard, and lined and seamed with the imprint of that consuming passion whose sign was also set in his grey, passionate, haunted eyes. Shabbily dressed in a soiled madras shirt and shoddy trousers, he wore neither tie nor collar: his unkempt chin hung in folds upon his chest. Fat and grimy forearms protruded from his rolled-up sleeves; fat and mottled hands trembled slightly but perceptibly as they rustled the pink and white clippings and with a stubby pencil scrawled mysterious hieroglyphics in the battered note-book.

Thursby was intent upon what he, and indeed all his family, knew as his "dope": checking and re-checking selections for tomorrow's races. This pursuit, with its concomitants, its attendant tides of hope and disappointment, was his infatuation, at once the solace and the terror of