here, Mrs. Clayton! I want to be as friendly to you as I can, but this isn’t treating us fair. If I told Mr. Devens he’d cancel his contract with you.”
She had shrunk away from him and stood with her handkerchief to her lips, whimpering.
“I know I shouldn’t have come. But money isn’t everything. Sometimes I feel as if I’d go mad unless I could touch her hand. But I won’t do it again. I promise you, Mr. O’Hara.”
“Well, see that you don’t.”
He lifted his square derby hat and stalked by her into the court-room.
“Hold on a minute, Jerry!” he called to the janitor, who was turning off the lights. “Got to find my bag.” His eye caught the Blind Goddess. “Why the devil don’t you clean up that picture? It’s that dirty you couldn’t hardly tell it was a woman—let alone Justice.”
The janitor suspended his labours, put his head sideways, and examined the picture critically.
“Is that Justice?” he inquired. “That’s one on me! I always thought it was supposed to be the Goddess of Liberty.”
Hugh and Moira, their footsteps lisping upon the marble flags, crossed the great hall of the rotunda, whose corridors rose tier on tier into a vast obscurity like the balconies of an empty opera-house. A chauffeur, warming himself within the revolving doors of the Lafayette Street entrance, hurried out ahead of them to a gleaming cabriolet, where he stood at attention, one hand on the door-handle, with a mink robe draped over his right arm. They paused beside him.
“I wonder if you appreciate the drama of your life!” said Moira. “I suppose you don’t. People never do. You work in the midst of a Comédie Humaine—you run the gamut of the emotions every hour in the day.”
To the west, up Franklin Street, beyond Broadway, the sky was a riot of gold, scarlet, and saffron. Behind them the black bulk of the Tombs rose like a grim stage donjon against a back-drop of pale blue sprinkled with gold dust. A motorized hook-and-ladder, clanging an intermittent warning, backed snorting into the engine-house on the corner, like a fire-breathing Fafner retreating into his cavern.
Moira put one foot on the running-board, then glanced over her shoulder. He had made no accompanying movement. The wind flipped her boa against his cheek.
“Come along!” she urged.
“Sorry,” he answered, still distrustful, “but I have to go to the office. I’ve no end of work to do.”
She replaced her foot on the sidewalk and faced him.
“But I want you to ride uptown with me—escort me home!”
“Look here!” he said suddenly and not altogether gently, “I’d like to know what this is all about! Suppose I do ride uptown with you—what then!”
“Get in and I’ll tell you!—Don’t be a goose!” And she gave a little chuckling laugh—tantalizing, irresistible. For some reason the acuteness of his resentment against her softened.
“Oh, all right, then!” he protested, getting into the car and sinking into the seat beside her. There was no harm in seeing what she was up to.
“You act as if you thought I were trying to kidnap you!” she declared as they glided off. “Most men would feel complimented.”
“Would they?”
“Aren’t you pleased that I want to make friends with you?” she demanded provocatively. “Don’t you want to be friends?”
He looked ahead through the plate glass. He had no intention of letting himself be vamped, but, on the other hand, he did not wish to misjudge her. Anyhow, she was worth being frank with.
“Look here, Miss Devens!” he said. “I have no idea of what you really want of me, but, to be frank with you, I can’t say I think much of your coming down the way you did this afternoon, as if the place were a zoo and you wanted to look at the animals!”
“But I am planning to do work in the Tombs, and I wanted to learn all about everything—so as to be of more service.”
“Service!”
“Yes—why not?”
“Good God!” he exclaimed. “What possible service do you think a girl like yourself could be to anybody in the Tombs?”
She looked at him for a moment as if doubtful whether or not to resent his remark. Then she laughed.
“You are frank!—Why couldn’t I—why couldn’t anybody—be of service to an unfortunate prisoner?”
“Because the trouble isn’t in the Tombs. That’s the last act of the tragedy. You’ve got to start earlier—with the prologue. When a fellow gets into jail he needs a lawyer, not a social-service worker. He doesn’t want perfumery, or flowers, or eclairs, or a Bible. He wants somebody to fight for him.”
They were passing Police Headquarters. A platoon of officers was just descending the steps.
“And fight like hell!” he growled through his teeth.
“Good!” she echoed. “I like that. I like people who do things that way—your way.”
“How do you know it’s my way?”
“Because that was the way you fought for poor Renig.”
“Oh, that was just luck! Redmond pulled a bone. Fasset, the assistant assigned to Part I, happens to have a retainer from the gas company and has to do what Ganz says. He was afraid to antagonize him, and so he sidestepped it—dumped it on Redmond. It would have been a walkout in any event!”
“What is going to become of Renig now?”
“Shoot himself, maybe.” He spoke quietly.
“Oh!” her breath came sharp through her teeth. “Don’t let him! You mustn’t!”
“He’s part of that melodrama of yours!” he retorted. “I should have thought what you saw and heard to-day would have given you a jar. How can you girls from uptown know anything about life? Look at this car! It’s like riding in a feather bed! You live in cotton wool. What can you possibly know about how to help people? How can you help them? All you do is dance and dine at restaurants and go to the opera.”
“I don’t blame you much for thinking so,” she admitted. “But I’m sick of the kind of thing you speak of! I’m tired of the men I meet out everywhere. They’re all the same! I prefer somebody real!”
She did not vocally append the words “like you,” and he was too absorbed in his diatribe against her class to notice her look or her intonation.
“Let me tell you something else!” he swept on. “It’s the rich people uptown that need the missionaries—not the folks below Fourteenth Street. Why should you assume that because a family lives east of the Bowery its members are any less intelligent, or less moral, or even less cultured than if they lived on Fifth Avenue? They aren’t! I tell you the poor people
