submerged--quite as the swimmer feels just before the final plunge. She
entered the park--it was scarcely more than a square of grass--with a
very definite feeling of relief, almost of rescue.

As usual, the park was crowded. But park crowds are different from street
crowds--they are crowds at rest, rather than hurrying, restless throngs.
Rose-Marie sank upon an iron bench and with wide, childishly distended
eyes surveyed the people that surged in upon her.

There was a woman with a hideous black wig--the badge of revered Jewish
motherhood--pressed down over the front of her silvered hair. Rose-Marie,
a short time ago, would have guessed her age at seventy--now she told
herself that the woman was probably forty. There was a slim,
cigarette-smoking youth with pale, shifty eyes. There was an old, old
man--white-bearded like one of the patriarchs--and there was a
dark-browed girl who held a drowsy baby to her breast. All of these and
many more--Italians, Slavs, Russians, Hungarians and an occasional
Chinaman--passed her by. It seemed to the girl that this section was a
veritable melting pot of the races--and that every example of every race
was true to type. She had seen any number of young men with shifty
eyes--she had seen many old men with white beards. She knew that other
black-wigged women lived in every tenement; that other dark-browed girls
were, at that same moment, rocking other babies. She fell to wondering,
whimsically, whether God had fashioned the people of the slums after some
half-dozen set patterns--almost as the cutter, in many an alley
sweatshop, fashions the frocks of a season.

A sharp cry broke in upon her wonderings. It was the cry of an animal in
utter pain--in blind, unreasoning agony. Rose-Marie was on her feet at
the first moment that it cut, quiveringly, through the air. With eyes