silence like pools of sinister black water.  She passed through stagnant odours and little eddies of perfume.  She lifted her drooping head and saw a door open—­the darkness was cut by a rectangle of soft yellow light, two figures were silhouetted, then the door closed.  A gasolene torch flared above a fruit stand hard against the towering black windowless wall of a warehouse and a woman squatted in the shadow turning a handle.  Nell pushed on past a cross street that glittered and flared from sidewalk to cornice, and at the next corner a single flickering gas-jet revealed a dingy vestibule with rows of tarnished speaking tubes....

The air became thick with noise and odours and the sidewalks swayed with people.  Great Taylor slowly rounded a familiar corner, slackened the momentum of the junk-cart, and brought up squarely against the curb.  Dragging the wheels, she gained the sidewalk and, beyond, the rims of the cart cut into soft earth.  She crossed the vacant lot.  A city’s supercilious moon alone gave its half-light to the junkyard of Grit and here the woman unloaded the cart, carrying heavy unyielding things against her breast.  She did not linger.  She was trembling from fatigue and from emotions even more novel to her.  She closed the gate without looking back at the weird crepe-like shadows that draped themselves among the moonlit piles of twisted things.  Nearing the corner, she glanced with dull eyes at a glaring red sign:  “Dancing.”  Voices, laughter, and music after a kind came from the doorway, A man was singing.  Great Taylor recognized the voice but did not pause.  She was not to see the man from just around the corner again for many years.

Hurrying, without knowing why she hurried, Nell climbed the circular iron staircase up through parallels of odorous gloom and, entering her flat, closed the door and quickly locked it against the world outside—­the toil, the bickering, the sneers, the insults and curses flung from alley gates and down upon her in the traffic of the Devil’s Own city.  She closed her eyes and took a long deep breath almost like a sigh.  She was home.  It was good to be home, but she lacked the words and was far too weary to express her emotions.

Lighting the gas she sank into a chair.  What did it matter if the gas was screeching?  She drooped there, hands in her lap, wrists crossed, palms turned upward and fingers curled stiffly like claws—­from holding to the jarring handle of the junk-cart.

Presently she raised her eyes and glanced across at the shelf with its row of tin boxes marked “Bread,” “Coffee,” “Sugar.”  On the next shelf was Grit’s molasses jug.  She arose and fumbled behind this, but nothing was there—­Grit’s Bible was gone.  Then she remembered, and striking a match placed her cheek to the floor and found the grimy book beneath the stationary washtubs.  “Stone wall,” she murmured, “Grit was a stone wall.”  At the mantelpiece she caught a glimpse of herself in the cracked little mirror, but she was too weary to care what she looked like, too weary to notice that her hair was matted, that grime and smudges made hollows in her cheeks, and that even her nose seemed crooked.