Hot as it was in the city, Patty and David went back to it to escape the oppression of solemnity. Patty’s face was lost in thick black veils, though her tears glistened like dew in the mesh. After the hushed loneliness and the fragrant comeliness of billowy Westchester, RoBards suffered from the noise of the train leading to the noisy city. The children greeted him with rapture, but Immy protested: “Papa, please don’t call me baby any longer.” “All right, old lady,” he laughed and winked at Patty, who winked at him. And neither of them could see how childhood was already the Past for this girl. It was only from the parental eyes that the scales had yet to fall. Their daughter was another creature from what she looked to the young men—and some not so young—who stared at her where she walked or rode in the busses on her way to school, to church, to a dancing lesson. RoBards did not know that Immy was already undergoing ogling, being followed, at times spoken to. She had entered that long gauntlet women run. Sometimes the young roughs and “b’hoys” who made the policeless street corners hazardous for women alone or in couples actually laid hands on her. She never told her father or mother of these adventures, because she did not want to worry them; she did not want them to know how much she knew; she did not want them to forbid her going about. She preferred freedom with risk to safety in the chains even of love. Musing upon her ignorance and goodness one evening, her father was, by a dissociation of ideas, reminded of his promise to look for Mrs. Lasher’s girl Molly. It would be a partial atonement for destroying the son, if he could retrieve the daughter from what was decently referred to (when it had to be) as “a fate worse than death.” He rose abruptly, and said that he had to go to his office. He left Patty with a parlorful of callers who brought condolences for her in her loss of both parents. RoBards thought that nothing could make death more hateful than to receive sympathy for it on a hot night in a crowded room. As he sauntered the streets he thought that nothing could make life or love more hateful than their activity on a hot night on crowded streets. Mrs. Lasher had feared that Molly had joined the “eighteen thousand women” of a certain industry. The number was probably inexact, but RoBards was convinced that none of them all was idle that night. Every age and condition seemed to be represented, and every allurement employed from vicious effrontery to the mock demure. But he found no one like Molly Lasher in the long, straggling parade. He glanced in at many of the restaurants, the bar rooms, the oyster palaces, the dance houses, the “watering places,” the tobacco counters; but he dared not even walk down some of the streets where music came faintly through dark windows. His face was known, his true motive would not be suspected, and it would be priggish to announce it.