The explosion of laughter that greeted this sally brought about them a number of other gentlemen, and the talk drifted into different channels. Presently young Avery glanced at his watch and started, with rather a sore heart toward the door. He remembered that he had promised the managers of his campaign that he would be seen that evening at a certain open-air garden frequented by the humbler portion of his constituency. He concluded to go alone the first time that he might the better observe without attracting too much attention. This plan was thought wise to enable him to meet the exigencies of the coming campaign when he should be called upon to speak to this element of this supporters. Once outside the club house, he took a card from his pocket and glanced at the directions he had jotted upon it. "I'll walk across to the elevated," he thought, "and make my connection for Grady's place that way. It will save time and look more democratic." V. The infinite pathos of life was never better illustrated, perhaps, than in the merrymaking that night at Grady's Pavilion. The easy camaradarie between conscious and unconscious vice; the so-evident struggle the young girls had made to be beautiful and stylish, and the ghastly result of their cheap and incongruous finery; their ignorant acceptance of leers that meant to them honest admiration or affection, and to others meant far different things; their jolly, thoughtless, eager effort to get something joyful out of their narrow lives; the brilliant tints in which they saw the future, and the ghastly light in which it stood revealed to older and more experienced eyes, would have combined to depress a heart less tender and a vision less clear than could have been attributed to Selden Avery. Not that Grady's Pavilion was a bad place. Many of the girls present would not have been there had it been known as anything short of quite respectable; but it was a free and easy place, where vice meets ignorance without having first made an appointment, where opportunity shakes the ungloved hand of youth and leaves a stain upon the tender palm too deep and dark for future tears to wash away. "I wonder if I am growing morbid," mused Avery, as he sighed for the third time while looking at the face of a girl not over eighteen years old, but already marked by lines that told of a vaguely dawning comprehension of what the future held for her. Her round-eyed companion, a girl with a childish mind and face, sat beside her, but all the world was bright to her. Life held a prince, a fortune and a career which would be hers one day. She had only to wait, look pretty, and be ready when the apple of fortune fell. Her part was to hold out a pretty apron to break its descent.