She walked for fear of standing
still. The noise fatigued her. She turned west to escape it and
found a little park at 161st Street.
Many streets flowed thence. There were ten ways to follow, and she
could not choose one among them.
She was pretty, but she had not learned the commercial value of
her beauty. She was alone in the great, vicious city, but nobody
had threatened her. Nearly everybody had paid her charm the tribute
of a stare or a smile, but nobody had been polite enough to flatter
her with a menace.
She was very pretty. But then there are so very many very pretty
girls in every big city! June with her millions of exquisite roses
is no richer in beauty than New York. Yet even New York cannot keep
all her beauties supplied with temptation and peril all the time.
Kedzie sat on the bench wondering which of the ten ways to go. It
turned late, but she could not decide. She began to be a little hungry
again, but she was always that, and she told her ever-willing young
stomach that her late luncheon would have to be an early dinner.
As she sat still, people began to peer at her through the enveiling
dark. A tipsy brewery truck-driver who had absorbed too much of his
own cargo sank down by her side. He could not see Kedzie through
the froth in his brain, but she found him fearful. When he began
to talk to himself she fled.
She saw a brilliantly lighted street-car, and she boarded it. She was
all turned around, and the car twisted and turned as it proceeded.
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