At Fourteenth Street they encountered the ebb of the turbid human tide that at nightfall flows east and west across the great Avenue and picked their way through.
Above Fourteenth Street they entered the deep dim canyon of loft buildings. The sweatshops were here from which every noon and every night poured forth the thousands upon thousands of toilers—underfed, undersized, prominent of nose, cheek-bones and lips, gesticulating, spreading and shambling of gait, filling the great Avenue with a low roar of voluble talk in a strange guttural tongue—crowding so densely that a chance pedestrian could no more than drift with the slow current.
The nightly torrent was well over when Sue and the Worm walked through the blighted district, but each was familiar with the problem; each had played some small part in the strikes that stirred the region at intervals. Sue indeed pointed out the spot, just below Twenty-third Street where she had been arrested for picketing. And the Worm noted that she had steadied perceptibly as the old associations bit by bit reasserted their claims on her life. She was chatting with him now, nearly in the old, easy, forthright way. By the time the huge white facade of the Public Library came into view, with its steps, terraces, railings and misty trees, and the crosstown cars were clanging by just ahead at Forty-second Street, and they were meeting an occasional bachelor diner-out hurrying past in dinner-coat and straw hat, the Worm found himself chuckling again. They turned west on Forty-second Street, crossing Sixth Avenue, Broadway and Seventh Avenue, passing the glittering hotel on a famous corner and heading for the riotously whirling, darting, blazing devices in colored light by means of which each theater of the congested group sought to thrust itself most violently upon the bewildered optic nerves of the passer-by.
Opposite one of these the Worm took Sue's arm, very gently, and halted her on the curb. The evening throng brushed past, heedless of the simply dressed girl who yet was oddly, boyishly slim and graceful of body, and who was striking of countenance despite the weariness evident about the rather strongly modeled mouth and the large, thoughtful green eyes; heedless, as well, of the lank, shabbily dressed young man who held her arm and bent earnestly over her. They were atoms in the careering metropolis, uncounted polyps in the blind, swarming, infinitely laborious structure that is New York. And they thought themselves, each, the center of the universe.
“Sue, dear,” said he, “here we are. You're about to see yourself. It will be an experience. And it won't be what you're thinking and—yes, dreading. I've seen it—”
She glanced up in surprise.
“Last night—an exhibition to the newspaper men.” The emotion in his voice was evident. She glanced up again, something puzzled. “It was last night—afterward—that I decided on bringing you in. I wouldn't for anything in the world have missed having you here to-night. Though, at that, if Mr. Greatest Publisher hadn't warmed my soul with that wonderful blast of hot air I probably shouldn't have had the nerve. Of course I knew it would be an ordeal. It's been on my conscience every minute. But I had to bring you, and I believe you'll understand why, two hours from now. I'm hoping you will, Sue.”
He hesitated. She waited. Suddenly then, he hurried her across the busy street and into the dim shelter of the gallery entrance.
“Zanin was out in front,” said he, “With some of the newspaper boys, but I got you by.”
Many individuals and groups were detaching themselves from the endless human stream and turning in between the six-foot lithographs at the main entrance to the theater. More and more steadily as Sue and the Worm stood in the shadow of the lesser doorway they had chosen, the crowds poured in. Others were turning in here toward the gallery and tramping up the long twisting stairway.