ough him.

A few minutes, and they paused at the exit from the ferry house.
They almost shrank back, so dazed and helpless did they feel
before the staggering billows of noise that swept savagely down
upon them--roar and crash, shriek and snort; the air was
shuddering with it, the ground quaking. The beauty had
vanished--the beauty that was not the city but a glamour to lure
them into the city's grasp; now that city stood revealed as a
monster about to seize and devour them.

"God!" He shouted in her ear. "Isn't this _frightful!_"

She was recovering more quickly than he. The faces she saw
reassured her. They were human faces; and while they were eager
and restless, as if the souls behind them sought that which
never could be found, they were sane and kind faces, too. Where
others of her own race lived, and lived without fear, she, too,
could hope to survive. And already she, who had loved this
mighty offspring of the sea and the sky at first glance, saw and
felt another magic--the magic of the peopled solitude. In this
vast, this endless solitude she and he would be free. They could
do as they pleased, live as they pleased, without thought of the
opinion of others. Here she could forget the bestial horrors of
marriage; here she would fear no scornful pointing at her
birth-brand of shame. She and Rod could be poor without shame;
they could make their fight in the grateful darkness of obscurity.

"Scared?" he asked.

"Not a bit," was her prompt answer. "I love it more than ever."

"Well, it frightens me a little. I feel helpless--lost in the
noise and the crowd. How can I do anything here!"

"Others have. Others do."

"Yes--yes! That's so. We must take hold!" And he selected a
cabman from the shouting swarm. "We want to go, with two trunks,
to the Hotel St. Denis," said he.

"All right, sir! Gimme the checks, please."

Spenser was about to hand them over when Susan said in an
undertone, "You haven't asked the price."

Spenser hastened to repair this important omission. "Ten
dollars," replied the cabman as if ten dollars were some such
trifle as ten cents.

Spenser laughed at the first experience of the famous New York
habit of talking in a faint careless way of large sums of
money--other people's money. "You did save us a swat," he said
to Susan, and beckoned another man. The upshot of a long and
arduous discussion, noisy and profane, was that they got the
carriage for six dollars--