"Goin' to kop out a new skirt?" inquired one.
"Yas," responded Rafael, now with a frank, satisfied chuckle.
"Then here's luck!" cried another.
As the health was being drunk, Dyker passed through the door and turned, alone, into the cool night air of the street.
Notwithstanding his natural bias, his severe schooling, and his honestly cynical and cynically limited view of this portion of his little world, he was ashamed of what he had just seen and heard and done, and he was disgusted. He walked down the avenue in the deepened shadows, for the first time in a long while more than half inclined to ask himself whether what he was to get was worth the price that he had already begun to pay for it; and for the first time, by way of answer, frankly facing the fact that the position of a corrupt magistrate was not much worse than that of a corrupt lawyer, and that neither position was much worse, and both certainly better paid, than the position in which his task had been to render anonymous assistance to the no less dubious course of more esteemed corporation attorneys.
He was too occupied with these reflections, disquieting and consolatory, to observe well the persons that passed him. He continued his way along the curb rather because he had started upon it than because he at all cared about whither it led him, much as he was continuing his progress in the political maze in which his lot was cast. He kept his head bent, and so he did not see a pale-faced, large-eyed woman that, turning a hasty corner, almost collided with him and then suddenly drew back and crossed the street.
There were changes in the woman's face, which might have precluded recognition. He had last seen her on the eve of a surgical operation and she had looked ill, but now, the cumulative effect of that and many other crises sat upon her, and it was only in her habitual gait, the swaying languid pace of an unstudied young animal, that he might have found enough to recall her to his memory. But Dyker's eyes were directed inward and so, when she turned aside to avoid the man that she fancied she had wronged, he did not realize that he had almost touched elbows with the woman he had once rescued, fresh from her dismissal from the sacred precincts of Mrs. Ferdinand Chamberlin's home.
She had started away from Washington Square in the same dull pain in which she had previously left the Ninth Street boarding-house presided over by the stony-breasted Mrs. Alberta Turner; she had been only a wounded dog, whose sole desire was to find a dark corner in which she could suffer unobserved; but slowly there reasserted itself in her torpid brain that new impulse toward a questioning of life which had so appalled Philip Beekman. The whole she could not see; her own case bulked so far in the foreground that little else of the picture was visible to her. But she knew that an ill-constructed world was against her; she concluded that all legitimate doors were closed upon her, and she felt gradually kindling a wrath that would end in general reprisal.
How she chanced into Rivington Street she did not know. She had no clear idea as to where she was to go, except that she must not return to burden Katie Flanagan. Yet, almost before she was clearly conscious of her whereabouts, she found herself accosted by a voice that proved to come from the lips of Marian Lennox.
"Mary Morton! How do you do? Where are you going? Where on earth have you been? Come in here; I'm just getting back from a walk. I am so anxious to hear how you are getting on, and I have been so disappointed because you never let me hear from you."