Something in the woman's solicitude--or it may have been the quick and unexplained change from violence to tenderness--frightened Mary even more than the initial outburst had frightened her. "I want to go home," she quavered. "Sure you want to go home," Rose acquiesced, without moving a muscle. "But how can you go? Max told me you'd sent your people a note saying you'd hiked out with him to be married, and how can you go home until he gets back here and you can take him along and show the goods?" Her tone was lightly argumentative, but it was also stolidly merciless, and it hurled true to its mark the shaft of conviction. Out of the yesterday, Mary heard the voice of her father that was the voice of a society rigidly shaped by the conditions of its own fashioning: "Bay 'un thirty year old an' noot another sin ag'in 'un, I would beat 'un within a bare inch o' 'er deeth, an' turn 'un oot to live the life 'un had picked fur herself!" She understood that statement now. "I can go to Max's," she hazarded. "To--_where_?" "To Max's father's." "Maybe you can; but it's a long trip to Hungary." Mary answered nothing. Rose had only confirmed what the girl had for an hour feared. "You see how it is," pursued Rose, reading Mary's silence with a practiced mind. "Better let me take care of you." Mary's face was hidden. Again she felt New York as a malevolent consciousness, a living prison implacably raising around her its insurmountable walls. There was, she thought, nothing left her but the diminishing hope of Max's return. "Now you will eat, won't you?" Rose was continuing. Mary shook her head. Rose patted quietly one of the clenched hands that lay close to her. "Better do it, dearie," she said. "I'm your friend; remember that. You can have whatever you want." Mary mastered what strength remained to her. She raised herself on her elbow. "Then let me go!" she pleaded, extending an open palm like a beggar asking for a crust. "I don't care if my clothes is mussed. I don't care what'll happen afterward. Just let me go!" "You're a fool," Rose made cool rejoinder. "Where'd you go?" "I don't know?" "What'd become of you?" "I don't care." "Well, you would care, all right, all right. You can't go home, and you've no clothes and no money and no references. You couldn't get work anywhere in New York, and you couldn't get away from New York." "I----" Mary groped through the darkness of her soul. "I can do housework." "Not without a reference you can't." "I could go to some office----" "If you went to any charity-joint, they'd throw you out because of what's happened to you." "I could beg on the street if I had to." "Do you think the men in this town give money for nothing to a good-looking girl? You could go on the street, that's what you could do." The phrase was new to its hearer, but the tone explained it. "Then," she stumbled forward, "I could go to the police. They'd help me. I could----"