"No," she said, "I ain't." The floor-manager was passing. The social arbiter turned to him. "Will," she asked, and her shrill voice seemed to carry over all the room; "what's this place comin' to? Throw that Fourteenth Street woman out o' here!" This was enough. Mary left the place, and, still aching in every limb, turned through a narrow cross-street to Broadway. Her eyes swam as she lingered before shop-windows in the hope that someone she passed would accost her. Her throat was dry and it hurt her when she hummed into the ears of careless pedestrians. Nobody seemed to heed her. The night was cold, and she shook like a recovering drunkard. She mastered all her strength to speak plainly to a complacent man in a great ulster. "Hello!" she said, trying to smile. "What's your hurry?" The man looked at her and swore. "You must think I'm blind," he ended. She knew that she looked ill, but she knew that she must find money. She pleaded with age, because she knew it to be æsthetically tolerant; she ogled youth, because she knew it to be inexperienced; and she stationed herself at last near a saloon in a poorly lighted quarter, because she concluded that the men leaving such places were the only men to whom she was just then fitted successfully to appeal. It was one o'clock in the morning before she could induce even one of these to give way to her, and he, staggering with drink so that she had to support him with all her ebbing powers, insisted on stopping in an alleyway when, for the first time, she picked a pocket. A dollar and a half was all that she had as she left him, and the next dark figure that she stopped--she did not look at his face or care what sort of face it was--answered her with sharp laughter. "A two-spot?" he cackled. "You have a few more thinks comin', old girl!" "A dollar?" suggested Mary, tremulously. "I got just a half--an' you ain't worth a cent more." She took it--what would she not have taken?--and she worked on into the dawn, on with a mounting fever and a sick determination, knowing now that her chances grew with the approach of morning and finding herself, when at last the morning came, with scarcely a dollar beyond the sum due for rent.