Cheap it doubtless was, but cheap also in the sense of small cost. Except in the larger cafés, the ordinary drinks sold at only five cents the glass, and the glasses were not an insult to the drinkers' capacity. Hermann and Katie had their beer at one of the smaller places. They dined for twenty-five cents apiece, without tips, at the "Home-Made-Lunch-Room"; they were twirled and buffeted in a swiftly revolving car down a series of precipitous canvas chasms, paying five cents apiece for the privilege of the shaking-up that, at home, Hermann would have resented with a blow; and they chose the last seat in the last car of a steep gravity railway, where a man must hold himself aboard with one arm and his shrieking sweetheart aboard with the other. It was all blatant, all tawdry, all the apotheosis of the ridiculous, all essentially America-at-play; but when, at night, in the electric-train shooting through the warm darkness, the pair returned citywards, it was toward their own hard-earned and with difficulty retained places of shelter that they were going, like children after a strenuous holiday of make-believe with school to begin upon the morrow; and if, in most of the seats, as in that occupied by Katie and Hermann, girls slept with their heads resting frankly upon sleeping masculine shoulders, it was but a rest before conventional partings at home-doorways, the play-day ended for the lonely couch, and the work-day soon to begin. VIII MR. WESLEY DYKER In that company of the ignoble army of martyrs over which circumstances had given Rose Légère command, there were five members. Besides Mary, who now was Violet, Celeste, whom ancient conditions had temperamentally predetermined for such service, and Fritzie, who had chosen a partly moral slavery as less onerous than a wholly economic servitude, there was the highly colored Englishwoman Evelyn, who regarded her present station as one of the descending steps inevitable for everyone that set foot upon the way they all were treading, and Wanda, a dark little Russian Jewess, who, as soon as she had landed at the South Ferry from Ellis Island, had fallen into the hands of the slave-traders, and had thenceforward persistently striven upward to the place she now inhabited. For the maintenance of her authority upon these and their patrons, Rose, unlike some of her fellows, did not have to depend upon the assistance of any man quartered in the house. To the discipline of the inmates her system of charge for clothes, food, and shelter was admirably suited; for the regulation of the visitors the generally nearby person of big Larry Riley, the policeman, amply sufficed. One other outsider seemed, however, to have a regular connection with the establishment, and this person early excited Violet's curiosity.