From Astor
Place she descended the city by the long artery of Lafayette Street,
in which teams rumbled heavily, and all-night workers shouted
raucously to each other in foreign languages. One of a band of
Italians digging in the roadway, with colored lanterns about them,
called out something at her, the nature of which she could only infer
from the laughter of his compatriots. Here too she began to notice
other women like herself, shabby, furtive, unescorted, with terrible
eyes, aimlessly drifting from nowhere to nowhere. There were not many
of them; only one at long intervals; but they frightened her more than
the men.

They frightened her because she saw what she must look like herself, a
thing too degraded for any man to want. She was not that yet, perhaps;
but it was what she might become. They were not wholly new to her,
these women; and they all had begun at some such point as that from
which she was starting out. Very well! She was ready to go this road,
if only by this road her prince could be freed from her. Since she
couldn't give up everything for him in one way, she would do it in
another. The way itself was more or less a matter of indifference--not
entirely, perhaps, but more or less. If she could set him free in any
way she would be content.

The rumble and stir of Lafayette Street alarmed her because it was so
foreign. The upper part of the town had been empty and eerie. This
quarter was eerie, alien, and occupied. It was difficult for her to
tell what so many people were doing abroad because their aims seemed
different from those of daylight. What she couldn't understand struck
her as nefarious; and what struck her as nefarious filled her with the
kind of terror that comes in dreams.

By these Italians, Slavs, and Semites she was more closely scrutinized
than she had been elsewhere. She was scrutinized, too, with a hint of
hostility in the scrutiny. In their jabber of tongues they said things
about her as she passed. Wild-eyed women, working by the flare of
torches with their men, resented her presence in the street. They
insulted her in terms she couldn't understand, while the men laughed
in frightful, significant jocosity. The unescorted women alone looked
at her with a hint of friendliness. One of them, painted, haggard,
desperate, awful, stopped as if to speak to her; but Letty sped away
like a snowbird from a shrike.

At a corner where the cross-street was empty she turned out of this
haunted