“No!  No!  No!  That gang of church-pillars!  I can’t stand it, I tell you; you mustn’t try to keep me!  You mustn’t!  I’m a rat in a trap here.  Gimme a few dollars.  Hundred and fifty is all I ask.  Not even alimony.  Lemme apply.  Gimme grounds.  It’s done every day.  Lemme go.  What’s done can’t be undone.  I’m not blamin’ you.  You’re what you are and I’m what I am.  I’m not blamin’ anybody.  You’re what you are, and God Almighty can’t change you.  Lemme go, John; for God’s sake, lemme go!”

“Yes,” he said, finally, not taking his eyes from her and the chin hardening so that it shot out and up.  “Yes, Hanna; you’re right.  You got to go.”

* * * * *

The skeleton of the Elevated Railway structure straddling almost its entire length, Sixth Avenue, sullen as a clayey stream, flows in gloom and crash.  Here, in this underworld created by man’s superstructure, Mrs. Einstein, Slightly Used Gowns, nudges Mike’s Eating-Place from the left, and on the right Stover’s Vaudeville Agency for Lilliputians divides office-space and rent with the Vibro Health Belt Company.  It is a kind of murky drain, which, flowing between, catches the refuse from Fifth Avenue and the leavings from Broadway.  To Sixth Avenue drift men who, for the first time in a Miss-spending life, are feeling the prick of a fraying collar.  Even Fifth Avenue is constantly feeding it.  A couturier’s model gone hippy; a specialty-shop gone bankrupt; a cashier’s books gone over.  Its shops are second-hand, and not a few of its denizens are down on police records as sleight-of-hand.  At night women too weary to be furtive turn in at its family entrances.  It is the cauldron of the city’s eye of newt, toe of frog, wool of bat, and tongue of dog.  It is the home of the most daring all-night eating-places, the smallest store, the largest store, the greatest revolving stage, the dreariest night court, and the drabest night birds in the world.

War has laid its talons and scratched slightly beneath the surface of Sixth Avenue.  Hufnagel’s Delicatessen, the briny hoar of twenty years upon it, went suddenly into decline and the hands of a receiver.  Recruiting stations have flung out imperious banners.  Keeley’s Chop-House—­Open All Night—­reluctantly swings its too hospitable doors to the one-o’clock-closing mandate.

To the New-Yorker whose nights must be filled with music, preferably jazz, to pass Keeley’s and find it dark is much as if Bacchus, emulating the newest historical rogue, had donned cassock and hood.  Even that half of the evening east of the cork-popping land of the midnight son has waned at Keeley’s.  No longer a road-house on the incandescent road to dawn, there is something hangdog about its very waiters, moving through the easy maze of half-filled tables; an orchestra, sheepish of its accomplishment, can lift even a muted melody above the light babel of light diners.  There is a cabaret, too, bravely bidding for the something that is gone.