The man, a young stock-broker in a bad financial plight, scarcely noticed that a female figure was passing him. Had the morrow’s market been less a matter of life and death to him he might have thrown her a 267 glance; but as it was she did not come within the range of his consciousness. To her amazement, and even to her consternation, Letty saw him go onward up the hill, his eyes straight before him, and his profile sharply cut in the electric light.
She explained the situation by the fact that he hadn’t seen her at all. That a man could actually see a girl, in such unusual conditions, and still go by inoffensively, was as contrary to all she had heard of life as it would have been to the principles of a Turkish woman to suppose that one of this sex could behold her face and not fall fiercely in love with her. As, however, two men were now coming up the hill together Letty was obliged to re-organize her forces to meet the new advance.
She couldn’t reason this time that they hadn’t seen her, because their heads turned in her direction, and the intonation of the words she couldn’t articulately hear was that of faint surprise. Further than that there was no incident. They were young men too, also in evening dress, and of the very type of which all her warnings had bidden her beware. The immunity from insult was almost a matter for chagrin.
As she approached Fifty-ninth Street encounters were nearly as numerous as they would have been in daylight; but Letty went on her way as if, instead of the old gray rag, she wore the magic cloak of invisibility. So it was during the whole of the long half mile between Fifty-ninth Street and Forty-second Street. In spite of the fact that she was the only unescorted woman she saw, no invitation “to go to the bad” was proffered her. “There’s quite a trick to it,” 268 Steptoe had said, in the afternoon; and she began to think that there was.
At Forty-second Street, for no reason that she could explain, she turned into the lower and quieter spur of Madison Avenue, climbing and descending Murray Hill. Here she was almost alone. Motor-car traffic had practically ceased; foot-passengers there were none; on each side of the street the houses were somber and somnolent. The electric lamps flared as elsewhere, but with little to light up.
Her sense of being lost became awesome. It began to urge itself in on her that she was going nowhere, and had nowhere to go. She was back in the days when she had walked away from Judson Flack’s, without the same heart in the adventure. She recalled now that on that day she had felt young, daring, equal to anything that fate might send; now she felt curiously old and experienced. All her illusions had been dished up to her at once and been blown away as by a hurricane. The little mermaid who had loved the prince and failed to win his love in return could have nothing more to look forward to.
She was drifting, drifting, when suddenly from the shadow of a flight of broad steps a man stalked out and confronted her. He confronted her with such evident intention that she stopped. Not till she stopped could she see that he was a policeman in his summer uniform.
“Where you goin’, sister?”
“I ain’t goin’ nowheres.”
She fell back on the old form of speech as on another tongue.