She walked westward, and then northward. She dodged across Fifth Avenue among the automobiles of careless, comfortable people on their ways to one place or another of swift enjoyment. She passed a notorious café at the warm windows of which she saw, seated at laden tables and opposite leering men, the painted faces of softly gowned women, the more successful examples of what she soon must be. And she came to hurrying Broadway through whose crowds she saw silently and cunningly darting, with smiling hate written on their tired, rouged lips, the girls whose dawn was the lighting of the street-lamps and from whom she wanted to ask for instruction in the one means of livelihood that remained to her.
Her soul was as weakened and vitiated as her body, and by much the same forces. Into her escape from Rose's, into her work at Mrs. Turner's, into her appeal to the employment-agency and her tasks at Mrs. Chamberlin's she had put every particle of strength that she could harness, and the result had always been failure. The social system was too mighty. She could not prevail against it. She must do its bidding, and since it was so impractically constituted as to bid her prey upon it, her sole solace must be found in preying fiercely.
She turned into a cross-street, full of refulgent drinking-places that beckoned by swinging doors, behind which were the voices of singers and through which passed, in alone and out with shame-faced men, unending streams of women with white faces and vermillion mouths and sadly encircled eyes. But Mary pressed westward, though she did not clearly know her intention until, having crossed two avenues, she found that the cafés gave place to small shops, and that the shops were giving place to tall, moldy buildings with long stairways before them, houses that had once, plainly, made homes, but that were now, as plainly, barracks for lodgers.
From one of these she saw come a slight girl under a huge hat heavy with two great plumes. Mary waited until this girl drew near, first hesitated when she observed that the girl was scarcely fifteen, then spoke when she noted the bedizened dress and the face of which the childish beauty had been trained to maturity and hardness.
"Can you tell me if I can get a room around here?" she inquired.
The girl's knowing eyes studied her.
"Hello!" she said. "When did you hit the road?"
"To-day. I want to find a room."
"Well, you can't go wrong. The house I live in is full-up; but you can ring 'most any bell along here and get what you want. There ain't no choice. One's as bum as another."
She nodded saucily and went on her way, and Mary climbed the steps of the first house she came to.