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Rh was pleased by the evening; talked a good deal about the two young girls, and the possibility of reforming them, or at least of giving them some good clothes, so that they would have a better chance.

Teresa could not get to sleep that night. When she closed her eyes the room was peopled by the dreadful faces she had seen. The drunken sailor, the "bouncer," the girl at whom those men had laughed, the pretty young girl with the spotted arm, stood out on a background of sodden, diseased, malevolent human wrecks. This was worse than the sham mirth of the Tenderloin; perhaps it was the reality behind the sham. The figures all whirled round as though in a drunken dance, and behind them she seemed to see uncounted myriads of other figures, all driven on blindly, all mad, broken, blighted.

Basil had given her his sketch of the "bouncer" as they came home. She had seen in his eyes that night not only gloom and weariness, but also the impersonal interest in the scene before him that meant a stirring of his impulse to expression. He would put them all down on paper—those pathetic girls, those brutal or stupid men—all that complex of misery, all that waste of life. And it would mean to him just fact—just what is what must be.

In her present mood she revolted, as she often did, against his acceptation of the world, invol-