On the day following, as MacNutt had arranged, the two paid their first visit to Penfield’s lower house, from which Durkin carried away confused memories of a square-jawed door-keeper—who passed him readily enough, at a word from the girl—of well-dressed men and over-dressed women crowded about a smoke-wreathed, softly lighted room, one side of which was taken up with a blackboard on which attendants were feverishly chalking down entries, jockeys, weights and odds, while on the other side of the room opened the receiving and paying-tellers’ little windows, through which now and then he saw hurrying clerks; of bettors excitedly filling in slips which disappeared with their money through the mysterious pigeon-hole in the wall; of the excited comments as the announcer called the different phases and facts of the races, crying dramatically when the horses were at the post, when they were off, when one horse led, and when another; when the winner passed under the wire; of the long, wearing wait while the jockeys were weighing in, and of the posting of the official returns, while the lucky ones—faded beauties with cigarette-stained fingers, lean and cadaverous-looking “habituals,” stout and flashy-looking professionals, girlish and innocent-looking young women, heavy dowagers resplendent in their morning diamonds,—gathered jubilantly at the window for their money. The vaster army of the unlucky, on the other hand, dropped forlornly away, or lingered for still another plunge. Durkin found it hard, during each of these brief visits, to get used to the new order of things. Such light-fingered handling of what, to his eyes, seemed great fortunes, unstrung and bewildered him. He had never believed the newspaper story that when the District Attorney’s men had broken open a gambling-house safe a few months before, they had found deposited there a roll of greenbacks amounting to over three-quarters of a million dollars. That story now seemed likely enough. Yet, with him, the loss of even a hundred dollars on a horse, although not his own money, in some way depressed him for the day. Frances Candler picked her winners, however, with studious and deliberate skill, and, though they bet freely, it was not often that their losses, in the end, were heavy. She had no love for this part of the work; and in this Durkin heartily agreed with her. “The more I know of track-racing and its army of hangers-on,” he declared to her, “the more I hate it, and everything about it! They say there are over fifty thousand men in the business, altogether—and you may have noticed how they all—the owners and the bigger men, I mean—dilate on their purpose of ‘improving the breed of the thoroughbred’—but to my mind, it’s to improve the breed of rascality!” He noted her habitual little head-shake as she started to speak.