--why, it'd be all up
with me. Little Maud would go on the grill."

She ordered and slowly drank another whiskey before she
recalled what she had set out to confide. By way of a fresh
start she said, "What do you think of Freddie?"

"I don't know," replied Susan. And it was the truth. Her
instinctive belief in a modified kind of fatalism made her
judgments of people--even of those who caused her to
suffer--singularly free from personal bitterness. Freddie, a
mere instrument of destiny, had his good side, his human side,
she knew. At his worst he was no worse than the others, And
aside from his queer magnetism, there was a certain force in
him that compelled her admiration; at least he was not one of
the petty instruments of destiny. He had in him the same
quality she felt gestating within herself. "I don't know what
to think," she repeated.

Maud had been reflecting while Susan was casting about, as she
had many a time before, for her real opinion of her master who
was in turn the slave of Finnegan, who was in his turn the
slave of somebody higher up, she didn't exactly know who--or
why--or the why of any of it--or the why of the grotesque
savage purposeless doings of destiny in general. Maud now
burst out:

"I don't care. I'm going to put you wise if I die for it."

"Don't," said Susan. "I don't want to know."

"But I've _got_ to tell you. Do you know what Freddie's going to do?"

Susan smiled disdainfully. "I don't care. You mustn't tell
me--when you've been drinking this way----"

"Finnegan's police judge is a man named Bennett. As soon as
Bennett comes back to Jefferson Market Police Court, Freddie's
going to have you sent up for three months."

Susan's glass was on the way to her lips. She set it down
again. The drunken old wreck of an entertainer at the piano in
the corner was bellowing out his favorite song--"I Am the King
of the Vikings." Susan began to hum the air.

"It's gospel," cried Maud, thinking Susan did not believe her.
"He's a queer one, is Freddie. They're all afraid of him.
You'd think he was a coward, the way he bullies women and that.
But somehow he ain't--not a bit. He'll be a big man in the
organization some day, they all say. He never lets up till he
gets square. And he thinks you're not square--after all he's
done for you."

"Perhaps not--as he looks at it," said Susan.

"And Jim says he's crazy in love with you, and that he wants to
put you where other