Page:Arthur Stringer--The House of Intrigue.djvu/77

Rh never-ending ache to be where they were. And they were not at The Pines. So I left The Pines behind me.

I made a clean get-away, crossed the ferry at Windsor with my heart in my mouth, and caught a D. & C. boat for Cleveland. From there I went on to Buffalo. And the next night saw me heading once more for New York.

But it was a different New York that I came to. I returned a stranger to my own home town. I nursed the delusion that henceforth it would be easy, instead of merely doing others, to do good to others. I think I wanted to be a sort of female St. Francis of Forty-Second Street.

The Big City soon put me straight on that. It began by humbling me; and it ended up by humiliating me. I used to think I knew the Old Burg like a book, the same as the broads and ribs who study menu cards in the trotteries and sing This Is The Life imagine they understand that imcomprehensible old island of unrest. I thought I knew it better than the office girls who twice a day take their subway dip and eat wheat-cakes in the dairy luncheries so they may hit the movies at night. I thought, because I'd been a cashier in a Fourteenth Street nickelodeon, and a wrapper and sales-girl in a