"It does, on the quiet—very quiet! But they're scared to death of being found out. Besides——"
"Besides—what?"
"Well, ma'am, your husband said when he engaged me he thought it would be best not to try and get you into any such place. It might hurt your feelings."
"Oh!" exclaimed Angela. Her "feelings," if not hurt, were in commotion. "He—he isn't my husband."
Then she wondered if it would not have been better to have kept silence, and let the man think what he pleased. He would never see or hear of her again. She laughed to show Nick that she was not embarrassed, and then hurried on. "I must see them smoking!"
"It would make you feel mighty sad, Mrs. May," said Nick. "I went once, and—it kind of haunted me. I thought to myself, I'd never take a woman who had a heart——"
"I haven't a heart," laughed Angela, piqued. "I've only a will. But—you're my host, so I suppose I shall have to give my will up to yours."
To her surprise, Nick did not yield. "We'd better begin with the singing children," he said to Schermerhorn, "and then we won't feel we're keeping them up late."
The guide led them through Dupont Street, the street of the bazaars, and another smaller, less noisy street, where fat, long-gowned men, and women with gold clasps in their glittering edifices of ebony hair, chaffered for dried abalones, green sugarcane, and Chinese nuts. In basements they could see through half-open doors at the bottom of ladderlike steps, earnest-faced men, with long, well-tended queues of hair, busily tonsuring sleepy clients. Stooping merchants, with wrinkled brown masks like the soft shells of those nuts which others sold, could be discerned in dim, tiny offices, poring through huge round spectacles as they wrote with paint brushes, in volumes apparently made of brown paper. Here and there, in a badly lit shop with a greenish glass window, an old chemist with the air of a wizard was measuring out for a blue-coated customer an ounce of dried lizard flesh, some powdered shark's eggs, or slivered horns of mountain deer. These things would cure chills and fever; many other diseases, too, and best of all, win love denied, or frighten away bad spirits.
By and by they turned out of the street into a dim passage. This led into another, and so on, until Angela lost count. But at last, when she began to think they must be threading a maze, they plunged into a little square court, where a lantern over one dark doorway showed faintly the blacks of irregularly built houses. Several small windows which looked upon the court were barred, and there was a door with a grated peephole, where Angela fancied that she caught the glint of eyes as the lantern swung in a light breeze. But there was no such grille in the low-browed door which the guide approached. It stood ajar, and he pushed it open without knocking.