Reginald Wright Kauffman

“ Crowded into the unsteady benches were pimpled boys with lolling mouths and preternaturally knowing eyes; youths already old in disease and drink and crime; full-grown men, frog-eyed or blear-eyed, who needed only the faculty of firmness and the chance to cultivate it; old men, who had lost their hold upon work in a country still too barbarous to pension its aged; and, though there were no young girls, here and there Mary saw a few women, bedraggled, sodden, hideous, because men had at some time thought them chic, dainty, beautiful. ”

“ She must smile; she must be one woman to all men. She must receive the blows with laughter, the ribaldry, the insults and the curses as wit. She must pass from this to that—and she must not care.
And yet Mary, who was Violet now, could do nothing but take as final the conclusion that Rose had drawn for her. To return home, even if she had the money, would be impossible, because to do so would be to court her father's anger and her mother's shame, with no hope of either pardon or justification. ”

“ Philip Beekman passed his long fingers through his black hair. It was the gesture she had seen him employ on that remembered night at Rose's, but now it had a new significance. The young man was as much the creature of his surroundings as Violet was the creation of hers. He could no more appreciate her point of view than she could comprehend his. It was as if they spoke different tongues. Beekman was powerless to argue further, and when a man reaches that condition, he takes a firm stand upon authority. ”

“ Faith was ready to destroy much, but would not jealousy destroy more? Her jealousy had consumed dignity, it had ravaged custom, it was burning restraint.
Mary's words had drawn in Marian's mind a concrete picture, and the contemplation of that picture had awakened an anger in which her genuine love had for the first time genuinely expressed itself. Before, she could have heard with light regret of Dyker's engagement to marry another woman. ”

“ Inside, Marian was looking at her hand as if, because it had refused to seek that of the woman who, she concluded, had shared Rose Légère's intimacy with Dyker, it had been scorched by the new passion aflame in her own heart. Outside, Mary, tramping the evening street, saw, in her memory of that hand withheld, a hand pointing her definitely away from the keeping of her promise, pointing her onward down the street as the place where, for the future, she must live and work. ”

“ For herself, for Max, but most of all for the hideous facts of life, she shook in physical disgust. Before the face of such things, what must birth and marriage mean? She opened her eyes, but she could not look at her silent witnesses; she shut her lids, but she saw, behind them, the hairy arms of a gorilla closing on her, to break her and bear her away. For one moment, all that she had loved she hated, and for the next, seizing his smiling reassurance as the one vow that could legalize what nothing could refine, all that she had come to hate she tried to force herself to love. ”

“ The homely, brown-haired Lithuanian, whose cheeks were less round now than they had been, and whose hair that needed no covering in the summer, was still uncovered, went to her weary picket-duty in Waverley Place the next morning—the morning, as it happened, that preceded Hermann's little brush with Mirka—with a slow step and a heavy heart. She knew the futility of the work she was performing; she saw it even in the relaxed vigilance of the policemen on the corners and in the mocking grins of the girls and toughs at the gloomy factory-door. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Here, from mixed drinks to mixed music, went not the thugs and blacklegs, the pallid men and the painted women that would have filled such a place had it been within the borough of Manhattan. In their stead here drove the cars of generally stolid people of business and leisure, and here, above all, walked the workers of the city, the weaker sex and the stronger, seeking holiday. The full-portion hat on the half-portion girl is as familiar to Surf Avenue as to the Waldorf palm-room; care is erased from the tablets of memory. On Coney there is no To-morrow. ”

“ The laughter of the hundreds of children rang out no more freely than did that of the thousands of their elders. Mothers with babies in their arms were young again. Stately blondes and languorous brunettes, gracefully seated on the wooden steeds of the score of merry-go-rounds, rode with a dignity unsurpassed in Hyde Park or the Bois, and never a cowboy at a round-up was more adventurous than the young East-Sider mounting a hired horse upon the Pony Track.
Every nook had something to sell, and Katie had her day's work in keeping Hermann from stopping at each booth. ”

“ On entering the Settlement she had left Dyker in a proud anger that forbade her acting upon his offer to come to her whenever she should send for him; on dismissing Mary she had so framed her promise of secrecy that she might repeat to Wesley the unfortunate woman's unconscious accusation; and on twisting and turning the reptilian thing over in her mind, she said in one breath that she could not send for Dyker and could not be at peace unless she did send. The fiercest passion that a conventional woman has is the passion for the knowledge that will most likely clinch her unhappiness. ”

“ At a mile from the county-town they left the car—Mary first and Max twenty yards behind—and then, for the competent young man seemed to have prepared for everything, walked across the fields, under the stars, to a flag-station where, within a few minutes, they could catch a New York express. Arm in arm they walked, but Max never once frightened her by a burst of affection, never once did more than to encourage her by plain statements of his loyalty and more ornate descriptions of the life before her. ”

“ Grotesque men, could you see them, stagger into dim entrances; terrible caricatures of women, if the light would show them, steal out and dart upon gutter-couched drunkards to paw their pockets. The night is alive with shadows, and the whole street a hungry, quivering quicksand.
Only by urging her eyes to their utmost could Mary make out anything of the house before which she and her unsteady companion came to pause. ”

“ Cassie's step sounded only a few yards away, but Schultz, now apparently satisfied of Violet's identity, displayed an unlooked for speed. The heavy hand that had been clumsily reposing in the bulging side-pocket of his coat shot free. Violet seized a fist that opened and withdrew as her own fingers closed on a bit of paper.
Cassie entered to find them the width of the kitchen apart. Violet was pouring herself a drink of whiskey into a soiled glass, and, if her hand trembled, the silk swathed back that was presented to the servant hid all tokens of nervousness. ”

“ Through her entire life she had been shut away from the real world, behind rich curtains and amid soft lights, until, fired with the unrest of a partial education, she had chanced upon a glimpse of classmates working in what they called the slums, and now, with all the enthusiasm of youth, she had resolved to join them. A maturer woman would not have taken so seriously a sudden impulse to engage in work for which she had no training, but Marian was young. ”

“ The thoroughfare is like a boiling cauldron; it can hold no more, and still it must hold more and more.
Only very slowly, as the night wears on, do the crowd and noise lessen; but at last, by tardy degrees, they do lessen. Imperceptibly, but inevitably, even this portion of New York breathes somewhat easier. By twos and threes the people melt away; a note at a time, the cries weaken and the shuffling dies; and finally, in the small hours of the morning, Rivington Street turns over, with a troubled sigh, to a restless doze. ”

“ She had just put away the last of the dishes from an early dinner and was passing the barred front window of the basement when, from the sunset across the square, a shadow descended to the floor within. She looked up, startled. In the areaway a dapper, dark, flashily dressed young man was standing, and the young man was Angel.
Violet darted away from the window, but Angel, reaching through the bars, calmly raised the sash, which, even in the warmest weather, was drawn against the noise and dust of the street. ”

“ For his own part, Dyker was quite certain of what he was and of what he would be. He had seen, beneath his lowered lids, that a clever man could gain both fortune and power through political prestige, and he meant to use that means to his end. He had also, while still with the firm of corporation-lawyers, been presented to Marian Lennox by her opportunely-met, socially-aspiring mother, and was, whatever his relation with other members of her sex, quite as much in love with her as he could be with anybody. ”

“ Rose pursued, "I'll just give you a drink."
And when she had come back, she had not come back alone.
The worst of prisons is that in which the door is so cunningly closed upon the inmate that, at last, after the brutality is familiar, the inmate seems originally to have closed it upon herself, and in such a fortress of pain Mary now found herself restrained. The process was simple. It was merely first to wound and then to inure. The descent to hell is not easy; it is red with blood and wet with tears; but hell itself must be endured. ”

“ Only a jaded city-gaze—and a well-trained city-gaze at that—would have seen in the blue eyes, the red mouth, the straight nose, pink cheeks, and abundant russet hair, any promise worthy of fulfillment,—could have detected the flower in the bud; and that such a gaze should, on this day of all days, have been leveled in the girl's direction was, perhaps, only one of those grim jests of a Fate that loves to play upon the harmony between man and nature, and that here observed the coming of a human spring that must be brief and sudden, a human summer parching and intense. ”

“ And Hermann knew that, now an election was near, both of these proud possessors of the suffrage were doing their exacted duty for the powers that permitted them to thrive, and were, like the army of others in their own profession, through all New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, through the tenderloin of every American city, providing for the voting of repeaters, of dead men, of men that never were, in the interests of whichever of the two great political parties happens to be in control of the city where such votes are needed. ”

“ Rivington Street turns and tosses on its hot couch, and through its dreams slink hideous shadows that dare not show themselves by day. One, ten, a hundred, each alone, they come and go: vague, inhuman. And then, reluctantly, the hesitant dawn creeps shivering out of the East River, and the weary day begins again.
Into this street—into its noisiest quarter at its noisiest time—the cab that bore Violet on her way to liberty at last turned and proceeded as far under the flaring gasoline torches as the evening crowd of workers, buyers, and sellers, would permit. ”

“ Throw that Fourteenth Street woman out o' here!"
This was enough. Mary left the place, and, still aching in every limb, turned through a narrow cross-street to Broadway. Her eyes swam as she lingered before shop-windows in the hope that someone she passed would accost her. Her throat was dry and it hurt her when she hummed into the ears of careless pedestrians. Nobody seemed to heed her. The night was cold, and she shook like a recovering drunkard. She mastered all her strength to speak plainly to a complacent man in a great ulster.
"Hello!" she said, trying to smile. "What's your hurry?" ”

“ But she knew that an ill-constructed world was against her; she concluded that all legitimate doors were closed upon her, and she felt gradually kindling a wrath that would end in general reprisal.
How she chanced into Rivington Street she did not know. She had no clear idea as to where she was to go, except that she must not return to burden Katie Flanagan. Yet, almost before she was clearly conscious of her whereabouts, she found herself accosted by a voice that proved to come from the lips of Marian Lennox.
"Mary Morton! How do you do? Where are you going? Where on earth have you been? ”