She heard Evelyn rise. She heard the front door open. She saw Wesley raise his arm. She hurried by the parlor door, and then, instead of turning to the stairs, gathered up her red kimona and ran through the vestibule, through a patch of soft, fresh darkness, and was tossed precipitately into a cab into which Dyker followed her just as the horse, under a quick blow, dashed madly up the street. At the open cab-window the night air beat upon her fevered face. She drank it deep into her thirsting lungs. It was the wine of freedom. XIV RIVINGTON STREET The eastern end of Rivington Street is a hectic thoroughfare. Often it is so hectic as to be no thoroughfare at all, but only a tossing fever-dream, a whirling phantasmagoria of noisy shadows, grotesque and reasonless. It seems a street with a bad conscience, for it never sleeps. The dawn, even in summertime, hesitates long before it comes shivering up from the crowded East River to drop a few grudged rays of anæmic light on Rivington Street. Already, out of the humming courts, the black alleys, and the foul passages that feed this avenue as gutters feed a sewer, a long funeral procession of little handcarts has groped its way and taken a mournful stand beside the fetid curbs; and soon, pausing at these carts to buy the rank morsels of breakfast that there is never time to eat at home, the gray army of the workers begins to scurry westward. First come the market-laborers, with shoulders bowed and muscles cramped from the bearing of many burdens. Upon their heels march the pale conscripts of the sweatshops, their hands shaking, their cheeks sunken, their eyes hot from loss of sleep. Follow the sad-lipped factory-girls, women before their time, old women before their youth, and then the long line of predestined shop-clerks, most of them still in short skirts and all of them, befittingly, in mourning-black. Swiftly they go, the whole corps of them, the whole corps strangely silent. The street is not emptied of them before it is filled again, now by solemn children on their way to school, children whose gaze is fixed, whose mouths are maturely set, and whose voices, when they are heard at all, are high, strident, nervous. As these go by, the shops begin to do business: the cheap food-shops, the old-clothes shops, the shops that sell second-hand five-cent novels for a copper, and the pawnbrokers'. The shawl-hooded housewives clutter in and out, selling first that they may buy afterward, and continuing like ants swarming about an ant-hill until noon strikes and the children parade stolidly away from school for luncheon, and back again.