At last, when we had exchanged the holiday gaiety and the sunshine of Bleecker Street for a dark, noisome side-street, she broke out explosively: "Hope to God you ain't going to turn out the way my last room-mate did!" "Why? What did she do?" "Went crazy," came the laconic reply, and she shivered and drew the old golf-cape more closely about her shoulders; for the damp of the dark, silent tenements on either side seemed to strike to the marrow. Something in her manner seemed to say, "Ask no more questions," but nevertheless I pursued the subject. "Went crazy! How?" "I d'know; she just went sudden crazy. She come to Springer's one day just like you, and she said how she was wanting to find a place to board cheap; and she was kind of down in the mouth, and she come home with me; and all of a sudden in the night I woke up with her screamin' and going on something fearful, and I run down and got the Dago lady in the basement to come up, and her man run for the police. They took her away to the lock-up in the hurry-up wagon, and the next day they said she was crazy,--clean crazy,--and she's in the crazy-house over on the Island now." "What island?" I asked, not with any desire to know this minor detail, but because I was too disturbed for the moment to make any other comment. It seemed to Henrietta, however, a most senseless question, for she remarked rather testily: "Why, just the Island, where they send all the crazy folks, and the drunks, and the thieves and murderers, and them that has smallpox." "Mercy! what an awful place it must be!" I cried. "And that's where the poor girl went?" "That's where she went--say, tell me honest now, didn't you run away?" "Run away! Where from?" "Run away from home--now didn't you?" "Mercy, no! What put such an idea as that in your head?" I asked, laughing. "Fanny Harley did." "Who's Fanny Harley?" "She's the girl they took to the crazy-house." "But," I argued, "is that any reason for you to suppose that I ran away from home too?" "Yep, it is. You're ever so much like Fanny Harley. You talk just alike, and you've got just the same notions she had, from what I can make; and she did run away from home. She told me so. She lived up-state somewhere, and was off a farm just like you; and--" "But I'm not a farmer, and never was," I put in. "Why, you told me yourself you was born in the country, didn't you?" and I saw there was no use trying to point out to Henrietta the difference between farmers and those born in the country, both of which were terms of contempt in her vocabulary. We were still threading the maze of strange, squalid streets which was to lead us eventually to the former brief abiding-place of Fanny Harley; and, filled with curiosity regarding my own resemblance to my unfortunate predecessor, I revived the subject by asking carelessly: "How is it I talk and act that makes me like Fanny Harley?"