“As smooth as silk,” said Sylvester aloud.

CHAPTER III

THE FINEST CITY IN THE WORLD

So Sheila Arundel left the garret where the stars pressed close, and went with Sylvester Hudson out into the world.  It was, that morning, a world of sawing wind, of flying papers and dust-dervishes, a world, to meet which people bent their shrinking faces and drew their bodies together as against the lashing of a whip.  Sheila thought she had never seen New York so drab and soulless; it hurt her to leave it under so desolate an aspect.

“Cheery little old town, isn’t it?” said Sylvester.  “Gee!  Millings is God’s country all right.”

On the journey he put Sheila into a compartment, supplied her with magazines and left her for the most part to herself—­for which isolation she was grateful.  With her compartment door ajar, she could see him in his section, when he was not in the smoking-car, or rather she could see his lean legs, his long, dark hands, and the top of his sleek head.  The rest was an outspread newspaper.  Occasionally he would come into the compartment to read aloud some bit of information which he thought might interest her.  Once it was the prowess of a record-breaking hen; again it was a joke about a mother-in-law; another time it was the Hilliard murder case, a scandal of New York high-life, the psychology of which intrigued Sylvester.

“Isn’t it queer, though, Miss Arundel, that such things happen in the slums and they happen in the smart set, but they don’t happen near so often with just plain folks like you and me!  Isn’t this, now, a real Tenderloin Tale—­South American wife and American husband and all their love affairs, and then one day her up and shooting him!  Money,” quoth Sylvester, “sure makes love popular.  Now for that little ro-mance, poor folks would hardly stop a day’s work, but just because the Hilliards here have po-sition and spon-dulix, why, they’ll run a couple of columns about ’em for a week.  What’s your opinion on the subject, Miss Arundel?”

He was continually asking this, and poor Sheila, strange, bewildered, oppressed by his intrusion into her uprooted life, would grope wildly through her odds and ends of thought and find that on most of the subjects that interested him, she had no opinions at all.

“You must think I’m dreadfully stupid, Mr. Hudson,” she faltered once after a particularly deplorable failure.

“Oh, you’re a kid, Miss Sheila, that’s all your trouble.  And I reckon you’re half asleep, eh?  Kind of brought up on pictures and country walks, in—­what’s the name of the foreign part?—­Normandy?  No friends of your own age?  No beaux?”

Sheila shook her head, smiling.  Her flexible smile was as charming as a child’s.  It dawned on the gravity of her face with an effect of spring moonlight.  In it there was some of the mischief of fairyland.