He was a young man, but the sort of young man that might be anywhere from nineteen to thirty-two, because he had the figure and the face of the former age and the eyes and the expression of the latter. The hair on his head was black and curly; though his hands were not the working-hands with which Mary was best acquainted, they were almost covered with a lighter down of the same growth; and through the pale olive of his sorely clean-shaven cheeks shone the blue-black hint of a wiry beard fighting for freedom. His lips were thick when he did not smile and thin when he did, with teeth very white; and his gray glance had a penetrating calculation about it that made the girl instinctively draw her coat together and button it. To his speech she could pay, just then, scarcely any attention, except to feel that its quick, thick quality, and its ictus on the vowels, denoted the foreigner; but his clothes were a marvel that would not be denied. His coat and trousers of green were cut in the extreme of a fashion that was new to her; his brown plush hat was turned far down on one side and far up on the other; his waistcoat, of purple striped by white, was held by large mother-of-pearl buttons, and his shoes, long and pointed, were the color of lemons. Impulsively she had refused an answer to his first words; but the young man was a member of the persistent race, and speedily followed the first speech with a second. "Chust say the vord," he pleaded, "und I von' bother you no more. I only vanted to make myself _square_ vith you." Mary hesitated. Something, she knew, she feared, but whether it was the man, herself, or the habit of obedience she could not tell. He was polite, he was respectful; he came, it was clear, from a happier world than her own--and, as against her own she was now in open revolt, a certain parley with this visitor from an alien orb seemed likely to constitute a fitting declaration of independence. Conditions had worked upon her to desperation, and the same conditions, little as she guessed it, had, under the mask of chance, inevitably provided this avenue of protest. "Oh," she said, "I'm not mad at you, if that's what you want to know." "I'm glad of that," he easily answered, as they turned, quite naturally, away from the main street. "But I thought you gonsidered me _fresh_." "Well, I hadn't never been introduced to you, you know." The young man laughed. "I'll introduce myself!" said he. "My name's Max Grossman--not my real name, because I vas born in Hungary an' nobody could say my real name ofer here. My fader is a big distiller in New York--he's vorth half a million un' more: anybody'll tell you about him. 'Und he's put me on the road for him." This and much more he told her in the following minutes. He drew a truly brilliant picture of his parental home, and, animadverting now and then with scorn on the town in which he now found himself, he painted in the highest colors the glory of Manhattan.