"If you're right bright, kiddo, you'll keep out of my way. You got me crazy to-night—crazy! Do you hear me, you little—"
"My hat!"
He flung it to her from its peg, with her jacket, so that they fell crumpled at her feet.
"You're called on your bluff this time, little one. This is one night it's quits for you—and I ain't drunk, neither!"
She crowded her rampant hair, flowing as Ophelia's, into her cheap little boyish hat and fumbled into her jacket. A red welt, shaped like a tongue of flame, burned diagonally down her right cheek.
"Keep out of my way—you! You got me crazy to-night—crazy to-night!"
He watched her from the opposite side of the room with lowered head, like a bull lunging for onslaught.
She moved toward the door with the rigidity of an automaton doll, her magnetized eyes never leaving his reddening face and her hands groping ahead. Her mouth was moist and no older than a child's; but her skin dead, as if coated over with tallow. She opened the door slowly, fearing to break the spell—then suddenly slipped through the aperture and slammed it after her. Then the slam of another door; the scurrying of feet down cold stone steps that sprung echoes in the deserted street.
The douse of cold air stung her flaming cheek; a policeman glanced after her; a drunken sailor staggered out of a black doorway, and her trembling limbs sped faster—a labyrinth of city streets and rows of blank-faced houses; an occasional pedestrian, who glanced after her because she wheezed in her throat, and ever so often gathered her strength and broke into a run; then a close, ill-smelling apartment house, with a tipsy gas-light mewling in the hall, and a dull-brown door that remained blank to her knocks and rings. The sobs were rising in her throat, and the trembling in her limbs shook her as with ague.
A knock that was more of a pound and a frenzied rattling of the knob! Finally from the inside of the door a thump-thump down a long hallway—and the door creaked open cautiously, suspiciously!