"Very well," she said indifferently. Then she smiled for the first time, and her face looked sweet and almost girlish once more. "You are very kind. Why do you take so much interest? I am only one more derelict. You must have seen many."
"Well, I'm just built that way. I took a shine to you the day in that old ark we ambled about in, and then I'm as fond of Masters as ever. D'you see? Now, let's get out of this. I'm going to see you home."
"Home!"
"Well, I'm glad the word gives you a shock, anyway. It's where you ought to be."
They left the restaurant and although, when they reached the sidewalk, she took his arm, he noticed that she did not stagger.
They walked up the hill past the north side of the Plaza. The gambling houses of the fifties and early sixties had moved elsewhere, and although there were low-browed shops on the east side with flaring gas jets before them even at this hour, the other three sides, devoted to offices and rooming-houses, were respectable. There were a few drunken sailors on the grass, who had wandered too far from Barbary Coast, but they were asleep.
"I never am molested here," she said. "I don't think I have ever met any one. Sometimes I have stood in the shadow up there and looked down Dupont Street. What a sight! Respectable Montgomery Street is never so crowded at four in the afternoon. And the women! Sometimes I have envied them, for life has never meant anything to them but just that. I never saw one of those painted harlots who looked as if she had even the remnants of a mind."
"Well, for heaven's sake keep your distance from Dupont Street. If some drunken brute caught you lurking in the shadows it might appeal to his sense of humor to toss you on his shoulder and run the length of the street with you—possibly fling you through one of the windows of those awful cottages into some harlot's lap, if she happened to be soliciting at the moment. Then she'd scratch your eyes out…. You know a lot about taking care of yourself," he fumed.
"Oh, I never go there any more," she said indifferently. "I'm tired of it."
"I can understand you leaving your husband and wishing to live alone—natural enough!—but what I cannot understand is that you, the quintessence of delicate breeding, should walk the streets at night and sit in dives. I wonder you can stand being in the room with such women, to say nothing of the men."