The street--it was Fourteenth Street, he told her--flared and seethed and spluttered before them. As if leaning over the head of a runaway horse, they shot in and out among clanging cable-cars, dashed by snorting vehicles of their own sort, and nearly grazed jostling cabs driven by cursing Jehus. Even at that late hour, some of the shops were still open, and the wide pavements on either side were black with countermarching processions of people, moving with the steady rapidity and stolidity of a swarm of ants. When the street ran by a tree-sprinkled square, its houses seemed to burst into still greater brightness to atone for the darkness of the park. Every second building was a restaurant, a theater for moving-pictures, or a saloon. Their electric-signs now winked from nothingness to light, now flashed forth a word, one letter at a time, and now were surrounded with wriggling snakes of fire. It came upon her--this vision of the absolutely new, of the city's immensity and teeming life--at a moment when her heart was ready for reaction, when memory was prepared to reassert itself, and when, anger gone and regret poised like a runner at the starting-line, her quick determination might have failed her. But it came with stupefying force. The dream of pleasure gave place for the moment to a certainty of dread. Vaguely, unreasoningly, but with the unquestioning acceptance of a child, she felt New York as a terrible, solidified unity; as a vast, malevolent consciousness; as a living prison that implacably and resistlessly raised itself on every hand and on every hand shut her in forever. She trembled and clung the tighter to her companion's arm, and her companion was alert to note her agitation. "Vhat's the matter?" he inquired, in a voice that he well meant to be tender. "I--I don't know," she began, her red underlip indrawn. "I--aren't we goin' pretty fast?" "Who? Us? Vhy, I was chust thinking I'd tell him to hit up the pace a little. Are you scared?" Her pride would not permit confession. "Oh, no," she lied; "I'm not scared." "But you are shivering." "I guess I'm kind of chilly." "All righd. Chust vait a minute un' ve'll soon be at the restaurant un' varm up. You'll like that restaurant: it's von of the swellest in town." "But it's pretty late," she ventured. "Your friend--are you sure he----" "Who? The minister?" Max patted her hand with reassuring affection. "Don't you vorry about him. He's all for me, und I'll get him out of bed chust as soon as ve've ordered our supper."