CHAPTER IX A RIALTO RAIN-STORM I lifted my face to the sudden pelt of the rain-shower, feeling very much like a second edition of King Lear as I did so. Not that I had lost a kingdom, or that I'd ever been turned out of an ungrateful home circle! But something quite as disturbing, in its own small way, had overtaken me. I had been snubbed by Mary Lockwood. While I stood watching that sudden shower empty upper Broadway as quickly as a fusillade of bullets might have emptied it, I encountered something which quite as promptly emptied my own heart. It was the cut direct. For as I crouched back under my dripping portico, like a toad under a rhubarb-leaf, I caught sight of the only too familiar wine-colored landaulet as it swung about into Longacre Square. I must have started forward a little, without being quite conscious of the movement. And through the sheltering plate-glass of the dripping hood I caught sight of Mary Lockwood herself. She saw me, at the same time that I saw her. In fact, she turned and stared at me. I couldn't have escaped her, as I stood there under the street-lamp. But no slightest sign of recognition came from that coldly inquiring face. She neither smiled nor bowed nor looked back. And the wine-colored landaulet swept on, leaving me standing there with my sodden hat in my hand and a great ache of desolation in my heart. She must have seen me, I repeated as I turned disconsolately back and stood watching men and women still ducking under doorways and dodging into side-streets and elbowing into theater-lobbies. It seemed during the next few moments as though that territory once known as the Rialto were a gopher-village and some lupine hunger had invaded it. Before the searching nuzzles of those rain-guests all pleasure-seekers promptly vanished. Gaily cloaked and slippered women stampeded away as though they were made of sugar and they and their gracious curves might melt into nothing at the first touch of water. Above the sidewalk, twenty paces from the empty doorway where I loitered, an awning appeared, springing up like a mushroom from a wet meadow. In toward one end of this awning circled a chain of limousines and taxicabs, controlled by an impassive Hercules in dripping oil-skins. And as a carrier-belt empties grain into a mill-bin, so this unbroken chain ejected hurrying men and women across the wet curb into the light-spangled hopper of the theater-foyer. And the thought of that theater, with its companionable crush of humanity, began to appeal to my rain-swept spirit.