"After the final curtain," it pursued, "the audience filed reverently from the house, omitting flowers, and Arlie Arlington broke a track record reaching the nearest Western Union office to summon several well-known ante-mortem specialists of New York to the bedside of the patient. Meanwhile, Vincent Marbridge was hastily organized into a posse of one to prevent Undertaker Cain from laying hands upon the sufferer and carting it off to what might prove premature interment in the mausoleum of his celebrated storage warehouses...." Dropping the paper, Joan went directly to the telephone and asked the office to have her bill ready within an hour's time. From this she turned to pack her new possessions in a trunk as new. It had never occurred to her that Marbridge might have left the hotel. Now she said that it was "just her luck!..." By one o'clock that afternoon she had shifted bag and baggage to a stuffy and poorly furnished bedchamber in a crowded, noisy, and not overclean theatrical hotel situated on a corner of Longacre Square. This establishment consisted of an old and rambling structure of four storeys, of which the street floor was given over to tradesmen. An all-night drug-store held the corner shop, while other subdivisions were occupied by a "tonsorial parlor," a dairy-lunch room in the favour of many taxicab chauffeurs, a boot-blacking business, and a theatrical hair-dresser's. Next door, off Broadway, stood one of those reticent brown-stone residences with perennially shuttered windows and a front-door to all appearances hermetically sealed, but negotiable, none the less, to those whom fortune had favoured with the password and sufficient money and witlessness to make them welcome with proprietors of crooked gambling layouts. Across the street rose the side wall of a theatre, decorated with an angular iron fire-escape. The day was almost unseasonably warm, but the hour appointed when the city should blossom out in awnings had not arrived. Joan's room was hot with sunlight that mercilessly enhanced the shabbiness of all its appointments, from the stained and threadbare carpet to the cheap bureau with its mottled, dark mirror, and the scorched and blistered edges of its top where cigarettes had been suffered to burn out, forgotten. But when Joan had unpacked and disposed of her belongings, she went to the window as she was, in a loose kimono generously open at the throat, and stood there for a long time, contentedly looking out.