rs.
Thus the public eye, small of pupil in the light of the open street, was
intentionally not invited to the dusky interiors. Something different
from mere lack of enterprise was apparent; and the signboards might have
been omitted; they were pains thrown away, since it was plain to the
world that the business parts of these shops were the brighter back
rooms implied by the dark front rooms; and that the commerce there was
in perilous new liquors and in dice and rough girls.

Nothing could have been more innocent than the serenity with which these
wicked little places revealed themselves for what they were; and, bound
by this final tie of guilelessness, they stood together in a row which
ended with a companionable barbershop, much like them. Beyond was a
series of soot-harried frame two-story houses, once part of a cheerful
neighbourhood when the town was middle-aged and settled, and not old and
growing. These houses, all carrying the label. "Rooms," had the worried
look of vacancy that houses have when they are too full of everybody
without being anybody's home; and there was, too, a surreptitious
air about them, as if, like the false little shops, they advertised
something by concealing it.

One of them--the one next to the barber-shop--had across its front an
ample, jig-sawed veranda, where aforetime, no doubt, the father of a
family had fanned himself with a palm-leaf fan on Sunday afternoons,
watching the surreys go by, and where his daughter listened to mandolins
and badinage on starlit evenings; but, although youth still held the
veranda, both the youth and the veranda were in decay. The four or five
young men who lounged there this afternoon were of a type known to shady
pool-parlours. Hats found no favour with them; all of them wore caps;
and their tight clothes, apparently from a common source, showed
a vivacious fancy for oblique pockets, false belts, and Easter-egg
colourings. Another thing common to the group was the expression of
eye and mouth; and Alice, in the midst of her other thoughts, had a
distasteful thought about this.

The veranda was within a dozen feet of the sidewalk, and as she and her
escort came nearer, she took note of the young men, her face hardening
a little, even before she suspected there might be a resemblance between
them and any one she knew. Then she observed that each of these loungers
wore not for the occasion, but as of habit, a look of furtively
amused contempt; the mouth