One raw and cold week-night, Pidge was about done up when she reached Harrow Street. She tried to slip softly past his hall door, but Dicky was there. “Hard day?” he called. “Yes,” she said, pushing on. “Everybody’s tired and cross the whole length of New York, like a sore spine.” “You haven’t had dinner?” “No, but I don’t think I’ll go out----” “I’ve been waiting, Pidge. There’s a little place near, where I used to come from uptown, thinking it an excursion--just a neighbor of ours now, _The Hob and Hook_, where they make a stew like Dickens tells of in the old English inns--smoking in the pot for twenty-four hours; and there’s tea for tired folks, and no end of scones and honey----” “Oh, please----” said Pidge. Then she added stubbornly, “No, I’m not going out again to-night.” “It is a trifle wintry,” Dicky observed. “We’ll have supper here. I’ll go out and get an armful, and Nagar will make us a pot of tea. Oh, I say, Pidge, have a little thought of somebody else.” She weakened. Alone upstairs a minute afterward, she lit the gas and stood before the mirror that waved. “If I turned loose just once and ate all I wanted, he’d never speak to me again!” VII “THE FREEDOM OF IGNORANCE” PIDGE was gone from Harrow Street from seven in the morning to seven at night. She had been absolutely blurred with fatigue at the end of the first days, but her hands were hardening, her back adjusting to the monotonous work at the big pasting table. She was actually learning like the other girls the trick of sinking into a sort of coma for an hour or more at a time. Sometimes (as one under the influence of a prying drug, which opens scenes, as from a past life) she would remember the palisades of Santa Monica, the ocean pressing its white fringes up against the gray sand; tirelessly pressing again and again, but never leaving its white lines of foam, unless the water was sick from the big sewer of El Segundo. Rarely a sail on that great sunny bay, but many wings--pelicans, sandpipers, gulls in hundreds, feeding out beyond the surf lines, or gathered in conference on the beaten sand--three strange and ancient bird types, gathered together in one vast audience facing the sea.