“Oh, I couldn’t accept this from you. Please! Don’t make me take it. I’m—” She felt it the moment for making the confession, and possibly getting hints—“I’m—I’m goin’ to the bad, anyhow.”
“Oh, so that’s the talk! I thought you said you’d gone to the bad already. Oh, no, sister; you don’t put that over on me, not a nice looker like you!”
She was almost sobbing. “Well, I’m going—if—if I can find the way. I wish you’d tell me if there’s a trick to it.”
“There’s one trick I’ll tell you, and that’s the way to Red Point.”
“I know that already.”
“Then, if you know that already, you’ve got my four bits, which is more than enough to take you there decent.” He lifted his hand, with a warning forefinger. “Remember now, little sister, as long as you spend that half dollar it’ll bind you to keep good.”
He tramped off into the darkness, leaving Letty perplexed at the ways of wickedness, as she began once more to drift southward.
But she drifted southward with a new sense of misgiving. Danger was mysteriously coy, and she didn’t know how to court it. True, there was still time enough, but the debut was not encouraging. When she had gone forth from Judson Flack’s she had felt sure that adventure lay in wait for her, and Rashleigh Allerton had responded almost instantaneously. Now she had no such confidence. On the contrary; all her premonitions worked the other way. Perhaps it was the old gray rag. Perhaps it was her lack of feminine appeal. Men had never flocked about her as they flocked about some girls, like bees about flowers. If she was a flower, she was a dust flower, a humble thing, at home in the humblest places, and never regarded as other than a weed.
She wandered into Fourth Avenue, reaching Astor Place. 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 272 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.