She was not appalled. For the first time in her life she was relatively free from fear. Even with nothing but her person as she stood, she was her own mistress. No big dread hung over her—that is, no big dread of the kind represented by Judson Flack. She might jump into the river or go to the bad, but in either case she would do it of her own free will. Merely to have the exercise of her own free will gave her the kind of physical relief which a human being gets from stretching limbs cramped and crippled by chains.
Besides, there was in her situation an underlying possibility of adventure. This she didn’t phrase, since she didn’t understand it. She only had the intuition in her heart that where “the world is all before you, where to choose your place of rest, and Providence your guide,” Providence becomes your guide. Verbally she put it merely in the words, “Things happen,” though as to what could happen between half-past three in the afternoon and midnight, when she would possibly be in jail, she could not begin to imagine.
So absorbed was she in this momentous uncertainty that she scarcely noticed that some one had seated himself at the other end of the bench. It was a public 31 place; it was likely that some one would. She felt neither curiosity nor resentment. A lack of certain of the feminine instincts, or their retarded development, left her without interest in the fact that the newcomer was a man. From the slight glance she had given him when she heard his step, she judged him to be what she estimated as an elderly man, quite far into the thirties.
She went back to her own thoughts which were practical. There were certain measures which she could take at once, after which there would be no return. Once more she was not appalled. She had lived too near the taking of these steps to be shocked by them. Everything in life is a question of relativity, and in the world which her mother had entered on marrying Judson Flack the men were all so near the edge of the line which separates the criminal from the non-criminal that it seemed a natural thing when they crossed it, while the women....
But as her thoughts were dealing with this social problem in its bearing on herself, her neighbor spoke.
“Funny to watch those kids playing with the pup, isn’t it?”
She admitted that it was, that watching children and young animals was a favorite sport with her. She answered simply, because being addressed by strange men with whom she found herself in proximity was sanctioned by the etiquette of her society. To resent it would be putting on airs, besides which it would cut off social intercourse between the sexes. It had happened to her many a time to have engaging conversations with chance young men beside 32 her in the subway, never seeing them before or afterward.
So Allerton found getting acquainted easier than he had expected. The etiquette of his society not sanctioning this directness of response on her part, he drew the conclusion that she was accustomed to “meeting fellows halfway.” As this was the sort of person he was looking for, he found in the freedom nothing to complain of.
With the openness of her social type she gave details of her biography without needing to be pressed.
“You’re a New York girl?”