and which
are chancy. They put each other wise. You have to take a bunch at a
time, of course. The Italian girls can never come along; their men
shoot. The girls understand, all right; but their fathers don't. One
gets to see queer places, sometimes, taking them home."

Eastman laughed drily. "Every time I touch the circle of your
acquaintance, Cavenaugh, it's a little wider. You must know New York
pretty well by this time."

"Yes, but I'm on my good behavior below Twenty-third Street," the
young man replied with simplicity. "My little friends down there
would give me a good character. They're wise little girls. They have
grand ways with each other, a romantic code of loyalty. You can find
a good many of the lost virtues among them."

The car was standing still in a traffic block at Fortieth Street,
when Cavenaugh suddenly drew his face away from the window and
touched Eastman's arm. "Look, please. You see that hansom with the
bony gray horse--driver has a broken hat and red flannel around his
throat. Can you see who is inside?"

Eastman peered out. The hansom was just cutting across the line, and
the driver was making a great fuss about it, bobbing his head and
waving his whip. He jerked his dripping old horse into Fortieth
Street and clattered off past the Public Library grounds toward
Sixth Avenue. "No, I couldn't see the passenger. Someone you know?"

"Could you see whether there was a passenger?" Cavenaugh asked.

"Why, yes. A man, I think. I saw his elbow on the apron. No driver
ever behaves like that unless he has a passenger."

"Yes, I may have been mistaken," Cavenaugh murmured absent-mindedly.
Ten minutes or so later, after Cavenaugh's car had turned off Fifth
Avenue into Fifty-eighth Street, Eastman exclaimed, "There's your
same cabby, and his cart's empty. He's headed for a drink now, I
suppose." The driver in the broken hat and the red flannel neck
cloth was still brandishing the whip over his old gray. He was
coming from the west now, and turned down Sixth Avenue, under the
elevated.

Cavenaugh's car stopped at the bachelor apartment house between
Sixth and Seventh Avenues where he and Eastman lived, and they went
up in the elevator together. They were still talking when the lift
stopped at Cavenaugh's floor, and Eastman stepped out with him and
walked down the hall, finishing his sentence while Cavenaugh found
his latch-key. When he opened the door, a wave of fresh cigarette
smoke greeted them