She was recovering more quickly than he. The faces she saw reassured her. They were human faces; and while they were eager and restless, as if the souls behind them sought that which never could be found, they were sane and kind faces, too. Where others of her own race lived, and lived without fear, she, too, could hope to survive. And already she, who had loved this mighty offspring of the sea and the sky at first glance, saw and felt another magic--the magic of the peopled solitude. In this vast, this endless solitude she and he would be free. They could do as they pleased, live as they pleased, without thought of the opinion of others. Here she could forget the bestial horrors of marriage; here she would fear no scornful pointing at her birth-brand of shame. She and Rod could be poor without shame; they could make their fight in the grateful darkness of obscurity. "Scared?" he asked. "Not a bit," was her prompt answer. "I love it more than ever." "Well, it frightens me a little. I feel helpless--lost in the noise and the crowd. How can I do anything here!" "Others have. Others do." "Yes--yes! That's so. We must take hold!" And he selected a cabman from the shouting swarm. "We want to go, with two trunks, to the Hotel St. Denis," said he. "All right, sir! Gimme the checks, please." Spenser was about to hand them over when Susan said in an undertone, "You haven't asked the price." Spenser hastened to repair this important omission. "Ten dollars," replied the cabman as if ten dollars were some such trifle as ten cents. Spenser laughed at the first experience of the famous New York habit of talking in a faint careless way of large sums of money--other people's money. "You did save us a swat," he said to Susan, and beckoned another man. The upshot of a long and arduous discussion, noisy and profane, was that they got the carriage for six dollars--a price which the policeman who had been drawn into the discussion vouched for as reasonable. Spenser knew it was too high, knew the policeman would get a dollar or so of the profit, but he was weary of the wrangle; and he would not listen to Susan's suggestion that they have the trunks sent by the express company and themselves go in a street car for ten cents. At the hotel they got a large comfortable room and a bath for four dollars a day. Spenser insisted it was cheap; Susan showed her alarm--less than an hour in New York and ten dollars gone, not to speak of she did not know how much change. For Roderick had been scattering tips with what is for some mysterious reason called "a princely hand," though princes know too well the value of money and have too many extravagant tastes ever to go far in sheer throwing away.