He dashed a distracted hand across his forehead and turned away without answer.
"Yet I must go," she said.
Before her blind fingers found the outer door, he was again beside her.
"You're right," he owned. "Forgive me, Jean. We'll see it through."
Their ride in the twilight seemed an excursion in eternity. Home-going New York met them in obstructive millions. Apparently they alone sought the lower city. From zone to zone they descended—luxury, shabby gentility, squalor succeeding in turn—till their destination loomed a dread tangible reality. It was fittingly seated here, Jean felt, where life's dregs drifted uppermost, sin was a commonplace, arrest a diversion. Would not such as these glory in the deed she found so hard? Would not the brain beneath that "picture" hat, the sable plumes of which—jaunty, insolent, triumphant—floated the center of a sidewalk throng, envy her the publicity from which she shrank? Then, as the ribald crowd passed and the garish blaze of a concert-saloon lit the woman's face, she threw herself back in the shadow with a sharp cry.
"Look, Craig! Look!"
Atwood craned from the cab, which a dray had blocked, but saw only agitated backs as the saloon swallowed up the pavement idol.
A policeman grinned sociably from the curb.
"Stella Wilkes," he explained. "Chesty, ain't she? She was pretty wilted, though, when they ran her in. I saw her come."