“But why?” he asked, hesitatingly.

“Not for no reason, except I—­I got to make myself believe you’re real!” She said it with a gasp.

Peter fell in beside her and she led the way.  The small restaurant to which she piloted him wasn’t pretentious, but it was, as she had said, clean, and the food was excellent.

She said her name was Gracie Cantrell, and Peter took her word for it.  While she was eating she discoursed about herself, pleased at the interest this odd, dark-faced young fellow with the soft, drawling voice seemed to take in her.  She had begun in a box factory, she told him.  And then she’d been a candy-dipper.  Now, you work in a lowered atmosphere in order not to spoil your chocolate.  For which reason candy-dippers, like all the good, are likely to die young.  Seven of the girls in Gracie’s department “got the T.B.”  That made Gracie pause to think, and the more she thought about it, the clearer it seemed to her that if one has to have a short life, one might at least make a bid for a merrier one than candy-dipping.  So she made her choice.  The short life and merry, rather than the T.B. and charity.

“And has it been so merry, Gracie?” asked Peter, looking at the hard young face wonderingly.

“Well, it’s been heaps better than choc’late-dippin’,” said Gracie, promptly.  “I don’t get no worse treated, when all’s said an’ done.  I’ve got better clothes an’ more time an’ I don’t work nothin’ like so hard.  An’ I got chanst to see things.  You don’t see nothin’ in the fact’ry.  Say I feel like goin’ to the movies, or treatin’ myself to a ice-cream soda or a choc’late a-clair, why, I can do it without nobody’s leave—­when I’m lucky.  You ain’t ever lucky in the fact’ry:  you never have nothin’, see?  So I’d rather be me like I am than be me back in the fact’ry.”

“And do you always expect to be—­lucky?” Peter winced at the word.

“I can’t afford to think about that,” she replied, squinting at the red ink in her glass.  “You got to run your risks an’ take your chances.  All I know is, I’ll have more and see more before I die.  An’ I won’t die no sooner nor no painfuller than if I’d stayed on in the fact’ry.”

Peter admitted to himself that she probably wouldn’t.  Also, that he had nothing to say, where Gracie was concerned.  He felt helpless in the face of it—­as helpless as he had felt one June morning long ago when he had seen old Daddy Neptune praying, after a night of horror, to a Something or a Somebody blind and indifferent.  And it seemed to him that life pressed upon him menacingly, as if he and Neptune and this lost child of the New York streets had been caught like rats in a trap.

The girl, on her part, had been watching him with painful intensity.

“You’re a new one on me,” she told him frankly.  “I feel like pinchin’ you to see if you’re real.  Say, tell me:  if you’re real, are you the sort of guy that’d give twenty-five dollars, for nothin’, to a girl he picked up in the street?  Or, are you just a softy fool that a girl that picks him up in the streets can trim?  There’s more of him than the first sort,” she finished.