"Of course it doesn't matter," she said. "At first I thought it might be somebody I used to know."
IX
They alighted at a kind of wooded island, girt by trolley lines and crisscrossed by many paths, along one of which they struck. Although it was November, the benches by the way frequently held slouching forms, sodden men or unkempt women, at whom none glanced save a fat policeman. Neighboring electric signs lit the lower end of the little park brilliantly, and here, cheek by jowl with restaurant, vaudeville, and saloon, Jean suddenly spied an august figure with which school-history woodcuts had made her familiar from pinafores.
"Why, this is Union Square!" she cried triumphantly. "I know it by Washington's statue over there. And this street we're coming to must be Broadway."
"You're not so slow," said Amy, halting at the curb. "Here's another chance to show your speed. Mind you step lively when I see a chance." In the same breath she dragged her charge into a narrowing gap between two street-cars, dodged a truck, circled a push-cart, and issued miraculously, safe and sound, upon the farther side.
They traversed now a street of entrancing shop-windows over which Jean exclaimed, but which Amy in her sophistication dismissed with the brief comment that the real thing was elsewhere. With the same careless unconcern she dropped, "This is Fifth Avenue," at their next crossing; but she immediately discounted Jean's awe by adding, "Not the swell section, you know," and hurried from its unworthy precincts toward an avenue which the elevated railroad bestrode. This, too, was wonderfully curious, with its countless little shops and stalls, but Amy allowed her a mere taste of it only and whipped round a corner into a dimly lit street of dwellings, each with a scrap of a dooryard tucked behind an iron fence.
As they mounted the high steps of one of these houses, Jean remarked with due respect that it was unmistakably a brownstone front—a species of metropolitan grandeur upon which untravelled Shawnee Springs often speculated vaguely; though its dilapidation, obvious even by night, helped to put her at her ease. A placard inscribed, "Furnished Rooms and Board," held a prominent station in one of the basement windows, which was further adorned with a strange symbol upon red pasteboard, explained by Amy, while they waited, as a mute appeal to a certain haughty city official whose business was the collection of garbage.
"The landlady's name is St. Aubyn," Amy further imparted; "or at any rate that's what she goes by. She's the grass-widow of an actor. Some people say her real name is Haggerty, but that needn't bother us. We can't afford to be finicky, or at least I can't."
"Nor I," agreed Jean.