She came to know of many things:  of “dates”—­vulgar enough affairs many of them appeared to be.  But she no longer dismissed them with that.  She always wondered now if the sordid-looking adventure might not be at heart the divine adventure.  Things which she would at one time have called “common” and turned from as such she brooded over now as sorry expression of a noble thing.  And then she would go home to her friends at night and sometimes they would seem the moving-picture show—­their pleasures and standards—­the whole of their lives.  And she sorrowed that where there was setting for loveliness the setting itself should so many times absorb it all, and that out on the city’s streets that tender fluttering of life for life, divine yearning for joy that joy might give again to life, should find so many paths to that abyss where joy could be not and where the life of life must go.  There were days which showed all too brutally that many were “called” and few were saved.

Thus had she passed the summer, and thus it happened that she did not have in September all the freshness and the gladness that had been her charm in May.

Though to the man waiting for her that afternoon she had another and a finer charm.  Life had taken something from her, but she had wrested something from life.

“I could have had a job,” she said, and smiled.

But the smile was soon engulfed.  “And there was a girl who needed it, she told me how she was ‘up against it,’ and through some caprice she didn’t get it.  Needing it doesn’t seem to make a bit of difference.  If anything, it works the other way.”

She had read in the paper that morning that the chorus was to be “tried out” for a new musical comedy.  Thinking that Ann, too, might have read that in the paper, she went.

She had been seeing something of chorus girls as well as shop girls.  She went to all the musical comedies and sat far front and kept her glasses on the chorus.  More than once she had stood near stage doors as they were coming out.  Seeing them so, they were not a group of chorus girls; they were a number of individuals, any one of whom might be Ann, more than one of whom might be fighting the things Ann had fought, seeking the things Ann had sought.  It was that about the city that got her.  It was a city full of individuals, none of whom were to be dismissed as just this, or exactly that.  She challenged all groupings, those groupings which seemed formed by the accidents of life and so often made for the tragedy of life.

She was talking to him about chorus girls; announcing her discovery that they were just girls in the chorus.  “I was once asked to define army people,” she laughed, “and said that they were people who entered the army—­either martially or maritally.  Now I find that chorus girls are girls who enter the chorus.  Even their vocabularies can’t disguise them, and if that can’t—­what could?