ough hers, my
new room-mate hurried me through the Saturday-evening crowd of
homeward-bound humanity.

VIII

WHEREIN I WALK THROUGH DARK AND DEVIOUS WAYS WITH HENRIETTA MANNERS

It had been an ideal day for March--a day touched with pale-yellow
sunshine in which one felt the thrill and the promise of the springtime,
despite the chill east wind.

Into the murky, evil-smelling squalor of Thompson Street this shy
primrose sunshine had poured in the earlier part of the afternoon; but,
being a north-and-south thoroughfare, it had all filtered out by
half-past four, only to empty itself with increased warmth and glory
into the east-and-west cross-streets, leaving Thompson dim and cold by
comparison when Henrietta Manners and I emerged from Springer's.

Henrietta wore a dusty picture-hat of black velvet with a straight
ostrich feather and streamers of soiled white tulle, and a shabby
golf-cape of blue and white check which was not quite long enough to
conceal the big brass safety-pins with which her trained skirt was
tucked up, and which she had forgotten to remove until we had gone some
yards down the street. While we stopped long enough for her to perform
this most important sartorial detail, my eye traversed the street before
us, which with a gentle descent drops downward and stretches away toward
the south--a long, dim, narrow vista, broken at regular intervals by
brilliant shafts of gold streaming from the sunlit cross-streets, and
giving to the otherwise squalid brick-walled canyon the appearance of a
gay checkered ribbon. But if the March sunshine had deserted Thompson
Street, the March winds still claimed it as their own. Up and down they
had swept all day, until the morning mud on the cobblestones had been
long dried up and turned to dust, which now swirled along, caught up in
innumerable little whirlwinds that went eddying down the street.

Grabbing up her demi-train in her bare hand, Henrietta and I also eddied
down the street and were lost to view for a few moments in the whirlwind
which struck us at the crowded corner of Bleecker Street.

This whirlwind was the result partly of physical and partly of human
forces. For it was Saturday night, and life was running at flood-tide
all over the great city. Always tempestuous, always disturbed with the
passion and pain and strife of its struggle to maintain the ground it
had gained, never for one brief moment calm, even at its lowest
ebb--now, on this last