Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/22

 they walked just a little slower along the cobbled street chewing, he with nervous grinding and she with delicate small bites as though nibbling a piece of chocolate.

In the railroad yards an engine toiled and panted in labor of shifting freight cars. The sky was a big blue-black grape.

Lucy's street, indifferently sentineled by a few wornout elms, was at the foot of a descent from the city's business center. After a cleanup by the City Fathers the once splendid palaces of faro and prostitution had become a motley of grey stone and red brick hulks. Into these a gang of landladies had crawled, converting them into barracks for poverty's lodgers. Excepting, that is, one mansion referred to ambiguously as "The Club."

But, despite the now drab crumbling lodginghouse appearance of the street, to Frank and his fellows, like tourists sniffing at hints made by guides in Pompeii's ruins, an aroma of forbidden delights still clung to the street. Many boys had become men on this street for a dollar or even fifty cents. It was here, even more than when Lucy was in his arms at the movies, that Frank felt what it must be like to be a man.

At the foot of the steps leading to the door of a faded red brick roominghouse Lucy took off Frank's coat and thrust it at him. Clumsily, he tried to put his arm around her but she gave him a little push.

"Listen, Frank, do you want to wake Mrs. Murphy? She hates me anyway already. Besides I promised Mother not to be late—go on home now. See you after school tomorrow."

He might have been a little puppy, he thought, deflated.

It was long past eleven and Lucy stood at the foot of the creaky staircase peering up to the next landing, listening intently. She rubbed off part of the lipstick with a finger and wiped it on the doormat. Mother didn't like her to use too much lipstick. The low gaslight flickered concealing the spaces beyond its orbit, and the ground floor left front roomer snored as if in agony.

Lucy took a deep breath and, two at a time, spanned the first flight of stairs, her eyes uneasily fixed on a door to the right. Creepy silence weighted the musty air.

She always tiptoed, holding her breath, past this second-floor door ever since smelly old Mr. Schmidt had invited her in to have some chocolates. Payment had been seized in flesh-creeping touchings 10