For a moment I thought I must have been mistaken,—that she was not a girl but a man-hardened woman. I followed them for some distance. And she was unmistakably a girl, probably under twenty, audaciously lithe and flexible. She walked without touching her father,—if he were that. He was a small man, wearing a soft hat a little down on one side, and moved with a bantam, egregious stride. One hand he carried deep in his trousers pocket, which gave him a slight list to the right, for his arms were short. The skirts of his overcoat fluttered in the wind and his left arm swung in an arc.
Presently I lost them, and that was all of it; but this experience, apparently so trivial, cost me all other sensations of first contact with New York. I wandered about for several hours, complaining that all cities are alike. I had dinner, and the food was like food anywhere else. Then I found a hotel and went to bed. My last thought was: Why did she look at me at all?
Her eyes were dark carnelian.
CHAPTER II THE FUNK IDOL
i
“Where is one-hundred-and-thirty Broadway?” I asked the hotel porter the next morning.
“One-hundred-and-thirty Broadway? That’s in Wall Street,” he said. “Take the elevated down town and get off at Rector Street.”
That was literal. Broadway is in Wall Street, as may be explained.