The Guilford was one of those ultra-ornamented, over-upholstered, gaudily-vulgar upper Broadway hotels, replete with marble and onyx, with plate glass and gilt and outward imperturbability, where a veneer of administrative ceremonial covered the decay and sogginess of affluent license. It was here, Frances only too well knew, that Little Myers, the jockey, held forth in state; it was here that an unsavory actress or two made her home; that Upton Banaster, the turf-man, held rooms; that Penfield himself had once lived; it was here that the “big-ring” bookmakers, and the more sinister and successful rail-birds and sheet-writers and touts foregathered; it was here that the initiated sought and found the court of the most gentlemanly blacklegs in all New York. All this she knew, and had known beforehand; but the full purport of it came home to her only as she descended from her taxi-cab, and passed up the wide step that led into the sickeningly resplendent lobby. Then, for the second time in her career, she did a remarkable and an unexpected thing. For one moment she stood there, motionless, unconscious of the tides of life that swept in and out on either side of her. She stood there, like an Alpine traveller on his fragile little mountain bridge of pendulous pine and rope, gazing down into the sudden and awful abysses beside her, which seemed to open up out of the very stone and marble that hemmed her in. For at one breath all the shrouded panoramic illusions of life seemed to have melted before her eyes. It left her gaping and panting into what seemed the mouth of Hell itself. It deluged her with one implacable desire, with one unreasoning, childlike passion to escape, if only for the moment, that path which some day, she knew, she must yet traverse. But escape she must, until some newer strength could come to her. She clenched and unclenched her two hands, slowly. Then she as slowly turned, where she stood, re-entered her taxi-cab, and drove back to her own rooms once more. There she locked and bolted her door, flung from her hat and gloves and veil, and fell to pacing her room, staring-eyed and rigid.