Morera gave a magnanimous wave of his arm, in which he seemed to confer upon the women the right to keep on their clothes. They clapped their hands and laughed like children. Soon to the sound of castanets they wriggled their bodies in a way that was not so much suggestive of dancing as of flea-bites. A lamp with a tin reflector jarred fretfully upon a shelf, and the floor creaked. Suddenly Morera held up his hand for silence. The knocking on the street door was getting louder. He asked the old woman if there was any way of getting out at the back. "Dat's all right, kid," he told Sylvia. "We can crawl over the dooryards at the back. Dat door in front ain't going to hold not more than five minutes." He tore the elastic from a bundle of notes and scattered them in the air like leaves; the women pounced upon the largesse and were fighting with one another on the floor when Sylvia and Morera followed the old woman to the back door and out into a squalid yard. How they ever surmounted the various walls and crossed the various yards they encountered Sylvia could never understand. All she remembered was being lifted on packing-cases and dust-bins, of slipping once and crashing into a hen-coop, of tearing her dress on some broken glass, of riding astride walls and pricking her face against plants, and of repeating to herself all the time, "When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed." When at last they extricated themselves from the maze of dooryards they wandered for a long time through a maze of narrow streets. Sylvia had managed to stuff all her jewelry out of sight into her corsage, where it scratched her most uncomfortably, but any discomfort was preferable to the covetous eyes of the half-breeds that watched her from the shadows. "I guess you enjoyed yourself," said Morera, in a satisfied voice, when at last they found a carriage and leaned back to breathe the gentle night air. "I enjoyed myself thoroughly," said Sylvia. "Dat's the way to see a bit of life," he declared. "What's the good of sitting in a bum theater all the night? Dat don't amuse me any. I plugged him in the leg," he added, in a tone of almost tender reminiscence. Sylvia expressed surprise at his knowing where he had hit him, and Morera was very indignant at the idea of her supposing that he should shoot a man without knowing exactly at what part of him he was aiming and where he should hit him. "Why, I might have killed him dead," he added. "I didn't want to kill a man dead just for a bit of fun. I started them guys off, see. They thought they'd got a slob. Dat's where I was laughing. I guess I'll sleep good to-night."