He drew up the other chair. The tea brightened the girl's eyes and brought back some of her colour. She began to eat with a sort of dainty ferocity like some starved wild animal. She seemcd to regard the young man's presence and the aid he had rendered her as a natural thing--not as though she undervalued the conventions; but as one whose great stress gave her the right to put aside the artificial for the human. But gradually, with the return of strength and comfort, came also a sense of the little conventions that belong; and she began to tell him her little story. It was one of a thousand such as the city yawns at every day--the shop girl's story of insufficient wages, further reduced by 'fines' that go to swell the store's profits; of time lost through illness; and then of lost positions, lost hope, and--the knock of the adventurer upon the green door.
But to Rudolf the history sounded as big as the Iliad or the crisis in 'Junie's Love Test.'
'To think of you going through all that,' he exclaimed.
'It was something fierce,' said the girl, solemnly.
'And you have no relatives or friends in the city?'
'None whatever.'
'I am all alone in the world, too,' said Rudolf, after a pause.
'I am glad of that,' said the girl, promptly; and somehow it pleased the young man to hear that she approved of his bereft condition.
Very suddenly her eyelids dropped and she sighed deeply.
'I'm awfully sleepy,' she said, 'and I feel so good.'
Then Rudolf rose and took his hat. 'I'll say good-night. A long night's sleep will be fine for you.'
He held out his hand, and she took it and said 'good-night.' But her eyes asked a question so eloquently, so frankly and pathetically that he answered it with words.
'Oh, I'm coming back to-morrow to see how you are getting along. You can't get rid of me so easily.'
Then, at the door, as though the way of his coming had been so much less important than the fact that he had come, she asked: 'How did you come to knock at my door?'
He looked at her for a moment, remembering the cards, and felt a sudden jealous pain. What if they had fallen into other hands as adventurous as his? Quickly he decided that she must never know the truth. He would never let her know that he was aware of the strange expedient to which she had been driven by her great distress.
'One of our piano tuners lives in this house,' he said. 'I knocked at your door by mistake.'
The last thing he saw in the room before the green door closed was her smile.
At the head of the stairway he paused and looked curiously about him. And then he went along the hallway to its other end; and, coming back, ascended to the floor above and continued his puzzled explorations. Every door that he found in the house was painted green.
Wondering, he descended to the sidewalk. The fantastic African was still there. Rudolf confronted him with his two cards in his hand.
'Will you tell me why you gave me these cards and what they mean?' he asked.
In a broad, good-natured grin the negro exhibited a splendid advertisement of his master's profession.
'Dar it is, boss,' he said, pointing down the street. 'But I 'spect you is a little late for de fust act.'
Looking the way he pointed Rudolf saw above the entrance to a theatre the blazing electric sign of its new play, 'The Green Door.'
'I'm informed dat it's a fust-rate show, sah,' said the negro. 'De agent what represents it pussented me with a dollar, sah, to distribute a few of his cards along with de doctah's. May I offer you one of de doctah's cards, sah?'
At the corner of the block in which he lived Rudolf stopped for a glass of beer and a cigar. When he had come out with his lighted weed he buttoned his coat, pushed back his hat and said, stoutly, to the lamp post on the corner:
'All the same, I believe it was the hand of Fate that doped out the way for me to find her.'
Which conclusion, under the circumstances, certainly admits Rudolf Steiner to the ranks of the true followers of Romance and Adventure.
The cabby has his point of view. It is more single-minded, perhaps, than that of a follower of any other calling. From the high, swaying seat of his hansom he looks upon his fellow-men as nomadic particles, of no account except when possessed of migratory desires. He is Jehu, and you are goods in transit. Be you President or vagabond, to cabby you are only a Fare, he takes you up, cracks his whip, joggles your vertebrae and sets you down.
When time for payment arrives, if you exhibit a familiarity with legal rates you come to know what contempt is; if you find that you have left your pocketbook behind you are made to realise the mildness of Dante's imagination.
It is not an extravagant theory that the cabby's singleness of purpose and concentrated view of life are the results of the hansom's peculiar construction. The cock-of-the-roost sits aloft like Jupiter on an unsharable seat, holding your fate between two thongs of inconstant leather. Helpless, ridiculous, confined, bobbing like a toy mandarin, you sit like a rat in a trap--you, before whom butlers cringe on solid land--and must squeak upward through a slit in your peripatetic sarcophagus to make your feeble wishes known.
Then, in a cab, you are not even an occupant; you are contents. You are a cargo at sea, and the 'cherub that sits up aloft' has Davy Jones's street and number by heart.
One night there were sounds of revelry in the big brick tenement- house next door but one to McGary's Family Cafe. The sounds seemed to emanate from the apartments of the Walsh family. The sidewalk was obstructed by an assortment of interested neighbours, who opened a lane from time to time for a hurrying messenger bearing from McGary's goods pertinent to festivity and diversion. The sidewalk contingent was engaged
