"Places we visit. Places for seafarin' men. I tells you I knows a daisy—Big Lou's keepin' it—an' they needs a new gal there, for I stopped in as I come ashore this evenin' an' they tole me the one I knew after last voyage was buried only yesterday."
Mary shuddered.
"Is it all right?" she asked.
"All right? Course it's all right. But mind you,"—his black eyes leaped into a sudden threat—"I'm takin' you to-night. No philanderin'. For this night y'er my gal."
She looked away.
"Mind you that," he drunkenly repeated. "I'm mostly as gentle as Nathan's lamb, but when I'm tricked I'm ready with my hands. It's all right. It's a good place for a good time. Plenty to drink an' the best o' company. Better come. I can fix it so's you can get a steady job there."
She shivered again, but she could not see why she should shiver. After all, she was glad to learn of any place where she would be sure of food to eat and a roof to cover her—and so she came to Summerton's.
XXIX
THE DOORS OF THE SHADOW
It is a winding and tortuous way across Greenwich Village to Summerton's. The mazed course runs through streets that squirm like worms between a fisherman's fingers; it skirts cobbled courts that are in twilight at midday and damp in the longest drought; it turns and doubles up passages that seem blind, dodges through the very bones of tumble-down warehouses, storehouses, houses so ramshackle that the imagination can conjure no possible use for them, and it comes out at last into a foul thoroughfare that appears to be no better than a stinking alley, so close to the water's edge that the masts of the river's cluttered craft look as if they grew upon the dirty, sagging roofs opposite, and so near to the wharves that the green walls of the buildings are wet and odorous as if from a continuous application of bilge-water.