“Fresh as a daisy!” said the voice of Bertram 69 Chester. Followed a struggle, a faint “stop, stop!” in the voice of the girl, the sound of gross and heavy kissing. In a moment, the white form of the girl broke down the road, the greater, darker form of the man lumbering after. He caught her, held her for a longer time and a lesser struggle. She came out of this one laughing, and down the road they went, his arm a black shadow about her waist.
Eleanor’s deeper and higher self—the self that lay like a filmy, impalpable wrapper about her conscious mind, so that at times she appeared to herself as two persons—that consciousness stood aloof in expectation of disgust, revulsion, horror. It came as a confused surprise that she felt nothing of the kind. A cloying sweetness, a sensation purely physical, as though a syrup had been poured into all the channels of her nerves, began in her throat, rushed through body and limbs. The sweet tide surged backward, beat in a wave of faintness upon her heart. Shame, like air into a vacuum, followed with a rush. She sank to the ground, clinging to the bench.
When she had so far mastered herself that 70 she could feel her own senses, she was praying aloud—praying in the rite which held her emotions while it failed with her reason.
“Ave Maria Sanctissima!” she was saying over and over again.
CHAPTER V
“Match you to see whether it’s good, old fifteen cent feed at the Marseillaise or a four bit bust at the Nevada,” said Bertram Chester.
“I’ll take you,” responded Mark Heath, flipping a silver dollar as he spoke. “Heads the Nevada; tails the croutons and Dago red.”
“Tails it is—aw, let’s make it the Nevada to show there’s nothing in luck.”