s,
on the north side in the boarding house district. She unpacked and hung
up her clothes and drifted down town again, idly. It was noon when she
came to the corner of State and Madison streets. It was a maelstrom that
caught her up, and buffeted her about, and tossed her helplessly this
way and that. The corner of Broadway and Forty-second streets has been
exploited in song and story as the world's most hazardous human
whirlpool. I've negotiated that corner. I've braved the square in front
of the American Express Company's office in Paris, June, before the War.
I've crossed the Strand at 11 p.m. when the theatre crowds are just out.
And to my mind the corner of State and Madison streets between twelve
and one, mid-day, makes any one of these dizzy spots look bosky, sylvan,
and deserted.

The thousands jostled Terry, and knocked her hat awry, and dug her with
unheeding elbows, and stepped on her feet.

"Say, look here!" she said, once futilely. They did not stop to listen.
State and Madison has no time for Terrys from Wetona. It goes its way,
pellmell. If it saw Terry at all it saw her only as a prettyish person,
in the wrong kind of suit and hat, with a bewildered, resentful look on
her face.

Terry drifted on down the west side of State Street, with the hurrying
crowd. State and Monroe. A sound came to Terry's ears. A sound familiar,
beloved. To her ear, harassed with the roar and crash, with the shrill
scream of the crossing policemen's whistle, with the hiss of feet
shuffling on cement, it was a celestial strain. She looked up, toward
the sound. A great second-story window opened wide to the street. In it
a girl at a piano, and a man, red-faced, singing through a megaphone.
And on a flaring red and green sign:

BERNIE GOTTSCHALK'S MUSIC HOUSE!

COME IN! HEAR BERNIE GOTTSCHALK'S LATEST
HIT! THE HEART-THROB SONG THAT HAS GOT 'EM ALL!
THE SONG THAT MADE THE KAISER CRAWL!

"_I COME FROM PARIS, ILLINOIS, BUT OH!
YOU PARIS, FRANCE!

I USED TO WEAR BLUE OVERALLS BUT
NOW ITS KHAKI PANTS_."

COME IN! COME IN!

Terry accepted.

She followed the sound of the music. Around the corner. Up a little
flight of stairs. She entered the realm of Euterpe; Euterpe with her
back hair frizzed; Euterpe with her flowing white robe replaced by
soiled white boots that failed to touch the hem of an empire-waisted
blue serge; Euterpe abandoning her lyre for jazz. She sat at the piano,