n't bring
any consolation.

Without knowing that what she felt now was an intensified form of the
same rebellion against scorn, she knew it was not consistent with some
inborn sense of human dignity to stand there pleading to be let into a
house from which she was locked out, even though it was the only spot
on earth she could call home. Still less was it possible when, round
the foot of the steps, a crowd began to gather, jeering at her
passionate beseechings. For the most part they were children, Slavic,
Semitic, Italian. Amid their cries of, "Go it, Sis!" now in English
and now in strange equivalents of Latin, or Polish, or even Hebraic
origin, she was suddenly arrested by the consciousness of personal
humiliation.

She turned from the door to face the street. It was one of those
streets not rare in New York which the civic authorities abandon in
despair. A gash of children and refuse cut straight from river to
Park, it got its chief movement from push-carts of fruit and other
foods, while the "wash" of five hundred families blew its banners
overhead. Vendors of all kinds uttered their nasal or raucous cries,
in counterpoint to the treble screams of little boys and girls.

Letty had always hated it, but it was something more than hatred which
she felt for it now. Beyond the children adults were taking a rest
from the hawking profession to comment with grins on the sight of a
girl locked out of her own home. She was probably a very bad girl to
call for that kind of treatment, and therefore one on whom they should
spend some derision.

They were spending it as she turned. It was an experience on a large
scale of what the girl in the studio had inflicted. She was a thing to
be scorned, and of all the hardships in the world scorn, now that she
was aware of it, was the one she could least submit to.

So pride came to her rescue. Throwing her coat across her arm she went
down the steps, passed through the hooting children, one or two of
whom pulled her by the skirt, passed through the bearded Jews, and
the bronzed Italians, and the flat-nosed Slavs, passed through the
women who had come out on the sidewalk at this accentuation of the
daily din, passed through the barrows and handcarts and piles of
cabbages and fruit, and went her way.

Chapter III

Exactly at this minute Rashleigh Allerton was standing outside Miss
Walbrook's door, glancing up and down Fifth Avenue and over at the
Park. It was the hour af