Behind the curtain of this casual conversation had been enacted a melodrama as intensely vital and elemental as any of Shakespeare’s tragedies, for the day Dawkins had fired Katie O’Connell—­“for reasons,” as she said—­and told her to go back where she came from or anywhere she liked for that matter, so long as she got out of her sight, Katie’s brother Shane in the back room of McManus’ gin palace gave Red McGurk—­for the same “reasons”—­a certain option and, the latter having scornfully declined to avail himself of it, had then and there put a bullet through his neck.  But this, naturally, Miss Beekman did not know.

As may have been already surmised Miss Althea was a gracious, gentle and tender-hearted lady who never knowingly would have done a wrong to anybody and who did not believe that simply because God had been pleased to call her into a state of life at least three stories higher than her kitchen she was thereby relieved from her duty toward those who occupied it.  Nevertheless, from the altitude of those three stories she viewed them as essentially different from herself, for she came of what is known as “a long line of ancestors.”  As, however, Katie O’Connell and Althea Beekman were practically contemporaries, it is somewhat difficult to understand how one of them could have had a succession of ancestors that was any longer than that of the other.  Indeed, Miss Beekman’s friend, Prof.  Abelard Samothrace, of Columbia University, probably would have admitted that just as the two had lived in the same house—­albeit at different levels—­on Fifth Avenue, so their forebears at some prehistoric period had, likely as not, occupied the same cave and had in company waded on frosty mornings the ice-skimmed swamps of Mittel Europa in pursuit of the cave bear, the mastodon and the woolly rhinoceros, and for afternoon relaxation had made up twosomes for hunting wives with stone clubs instead of mashies in their hairy prehensile hands.

It would seem, therefore, that—­whatever of tradition might have originated in the epoch in question—­glimmerings of sportsmanship, of personal pride, of tribal duty or of conscience ought to have been the common heritage of them both.  For it was assuredly true that while Miss Katie’s historic ancestors had been Celtiberians, clad on occasion only in a thin coating of blue paint, Miss Althea’s had dwelt in the dank marshes of the Elbe and had been unmistakably Teutonic, though this curse had been largely removed by racial intermarriage during subsequent thousands of years.  Indeed, it may well have been that in the dimmer past some Beekman serf on bended knee had handed a gilded harp to some King O’Connell on his throne.  If the O’Connells were foreigners the Beekmans, from the point of view of the aboriginal American, were no less so simply because they had preceded them by a couple of hundred years.