Hilda hesitated. "It might look as if I—" She did not finish.
"But you needn't show yourself," replied Sophie. "You can wait down the street and I'll go up to the door and won't give my name."
Hilda clasped her arm more tightly about Sophie's waist and they set out. They walked more and more swiftly until toward the last they were almost running. At the corner of Fifteenth Street and First Avenue Hilda stopped. "I'll go through to Stuyvesant Square," she said, "and wait there on a bench near the Sixteenth Street entrance. You'll be quick, won't you?"
Sophie went to Mr. Feuerstein's number and rang. After a long wait a slovenly girl in a stained red wrapper, her hair in curl-papers and one stocking down about her high-heeled slipper, opened the door and said: "What do you want? I sent the maid for a pitcher of beer."
"I want to ask about Mr. Feuerstein," replied Sophie.
The girl's pert, prematurely-wrinkled face took on a quizzical smile. "Oh!" she said. "You can go up to his room. Third floor, back. Knock hard—he's a heavy sleeper."
Sophie climbed the stairs and knocked loudly. "Come!" was the answer in German, in Mr. Feuerstein's deep stage-voice.
She opened the door a few inches and said through the crack: "It's me, Mr. Feuerstein—Sophie Liebers—from down in Avenue A—Hilda's friend."
"Come in," was Mr. Feuerstein's reply, in a weary voice, after a pause. From Ganser's he had come straight home and had been sitting there ever since, depressed, angry, perplexed.
Sophie pushed the door wide and stood upon the threshold. "Hilda's over in Stuyvesant Square," she said. "She thought you might be sick, so we came. But if you go to her, you must pretend you came by accident and didn't see me."