horses, and that the page had been cruelly lacerated by a hat
pin, it was fair to suppose that whoever was at the other end of
the wire, was tempting her with the closing odds at the races.

In her speculations, she was interrupted by "Mannie" Day, who
entered softy through the door from the hall.

"Mannie" Day was a youth of twenty-four. It was his heart's
desire to be a "Broadwayard." He wanted to know all of those,
and to be known only by those, who moved between the giant
pillars that New York threw into the sky to mark her progress
North.

He knew the soiled White Way as the oldest inhabitant knows the
single street of the village. He knew it from the Rathskellers
underground, to the roof gardens in the sky; in his firmament
the stars were the electric advertisements over Long Acre
Square, his mother earth was asphalt, the breath of his nostrils
gasolene, the telegraph was his Bible. His grief was that no one
in the Tenderloin would take him seriously; would believe him
wicked, wise, predatory. They might love him, they might laugh
with him, they might clamor for his company, in no flat that
could boast a piano, was he not, on his entrance, greeted with a
shout; but the real Knights of the Highway treated him always as
the questioning, wide-eyed child. In spite of his after-midnight
pallor, in spite of his honorable scars of dissipation, it was
his misfortune to be cursed with a smile that was a perpetual
plea of "not guilty."

"What can you expect?" an outspoken friend, who made a living as