So far, indeed, one may journey with naught save admiration and respect for civic pride; but farther to the northeast, across the bay, there lies a region of a far more doubtful sort. Here, dark and dreary and sinister, begins that inevitable portion of a great city, at the mention of which women are wont to raise their eyebrows, and men--of a certain stamp--to shrug their shoulders and smile meaningly. Here is the abiding place of those who for many varying reasons prefer to live in a district unhampered by the authorities; a place where each is a law unto himself alone; where the red blood pulses more swiftly through the veins, and where the primal passions of men and women hold freer sway. To this wilderness in the otherwise well-ordered city, from time to time wander men of birth and breeding from the opposite end of town. Some of them come from real love of vice, due perchance to some inherited taint, perchance to some flaw or weakness in themselves. Others, for the most part younger men, fresh from school or college, come with a vague idea that they are thus seeing life, and earning for themselves the right to be classed as men of the world. A few, indeed, come out of mere curiosity, mere slummers, pleased and risen in their own estimation to find others so much wickeder and more miserably off than themselves. The great majority, however, desirous of standing well in their own circle, deem it wise to let the district severely alone, for in the faintly Puritanical atmosphere south of the park to have it known that one has even been seen north of Fulton Street means always a possibility of ill-natured gossip and even of unpleasant scandal. Therefore, on the night after the dinner at the Albemarle, if any one of Gordon's friends had chanced to follow him as he crossed the park, they would have had good cause for surprise, for, instead of following the avenue, or turning sharp to the west, he kept straight on northward, past the cove, past Fulton Street, almost to the bridge, and then, with one quick glance behind him, swung around to the east in a wide half-circle, finally turning up a little, narrow, unfrequented side street at the very limits of the city, beyond which the broad salt marshes stretched away until their outline was lost as they merged with the flats that bordered the broad tide-river flowing peacefully onward towards the sea.