XXIII
Dick had found it hard to leave Elizabeth, for she clung to him in her grief with childish wistfulness. He found, too, that her family depended on him rather than on Leslie Ward for moral support. It was to him that Walter Wheeler looked for assurance that the father had had no indirect responsibility for the son's death; it was to him that Jim's mother, lying gray-faced and listless in her bed or on her couch, brought her anxious questionings. Had Jim suffered? Could they have avoided it? And an insistent demand to know who and what had been the girl who was with him.
In spite of his own feeling that he would have to go to Norada quickly, before David became impatient over his exile, Dick took a few hours to find the answer to that question. But when he found it he could not tell them. The girl had been a dweller in the shady byways of life, had played her small unmoral part and gone on, perhaps to some place where men were kinder and less urgent. Dick did not judge her. He saw her, as her kind had been through all time, storm centers of the social world, passively and unconsciously blighting, at once the hunters and the prey.
He secured her former address from the police, a three-story brick rooming-house in the local tenderloin, and waited rather uncomfortably for the mistress of the place to see him. She came at last, a big woman, vast and shapeless and with an amiable loose smile, and she came in with the light step of the overfleshed, only to pause in the doorway and to stare at him.
“My God!” she said. “I thought you were dead!”
“I'm afraid you're mistaking me for some one else, aren't you?”
She looked at him carefully.
“I'd have sworn—” she muttered, and turning to the button inside the door she switched on the light. Then she surveyed him again.
“What's your name?”