“Trust me for that part of it,” Bromley said. “There are more ways of killing a cat than by choking it to death with thick cream. If you are through, let’s go out and see what this money-mad city looks like by lamplight in the spring of a new year. I have a fairly vivid recollection of its appearance under such conditions a short twelve-month ago.” In Philip’s acquiescence to this proposal there was a strong thread of the brother-keeping weave, an inheritance from a long line of ancestors who took their Bible literally. From the ancestral point of view, Bromley was still figuring, in Philip’s estimation, as a brand snatched from the burning. With the means now at his command to gratify the worst impulses of the ne’er-do-well, could Bromley be trusted to walk alone in the midst of temptations? Philip thought not; feared not, at least. Therefore, the brotherly supervision must be maintained. “Where to?” he asked, as they fared forth from the hotel. “Oh, I don’t mind; anywhere you like,” was the careless reply. “The theater, if that jumps with your notion.” With the new opera house still figuring as an unfinished building, the only legitimate theater was a remodeled billiard hall in Sixteenth Street; and on this particular evening they found it dark. “That puts it up to the varieties,” said Bromley. “Care to go down to the Corinthian?” It was a measure of the distance Philip had traversed in a year that he did not immediately negative this proposal. He had known the Corinthian--though only by repute--as a place sedulously to be avoided by all self-respecting persons; a combined varieties theater, gambling house and worse, catering only to the abandoned of both sexes. But now an impulse which he was calling idle curiosity made him acquiesce. Why shouldn’t a man go to such a place at least once in a way, if only to see for himself and thus be able to condemn with knowledge, and not merely from hearsay? And Bromley?--Bromley would be safe enough, with somebody to look out for him and hold on to him. So he said: “I don’t care--if you know the way around in such places. I’ve never been there.” Bromley laughed. “It will give you a vastly better opinion of the general run of mankind--and womankind, I imagine,” he said half mockingly. “Come along; I’ll chaperon you.” Some hours later, when Philip wound his watch and put it under his pillow, preparatory to undressing and going to bed, its hands were pointing to midnight. With creeping shudders of repulsion he was telling himself that in the time intervening between the half-hesitant accession to Bromley’s suggestion and their return to the hotel he had not only seen humanity at its lowest ebb, but had also besmeared his own body and mind with the reeking mud of the tide flats.