“No.”

“Ever been married?”

“Certainly not.”

“How do you know?”

Harlson looked surprised, and then he became indignant again.

“Alf,” said he, “you have good traits, but you have paralysis of a certain section of your brain.  You don’t remember things.  Don’t you think I could tell whether or not a woman were married?”

I did not answer him off-hand.  I could not very well.  He knew that his reply had set me thinking of many a curious test and many a curious experience.  Harlson had an odd fad over which we had many a debate.

It occurred usually upon the street cars.  He would make a study of the women in the car when we were together—­it seemed to amuse him—­and tell me whether they were married or not.  He would not look at their hands—­that would be a point of honor between us—­but only at their eyes, and then he would say whether any particular woman were married or single, and we would leave it to the rings to decide.

Sometimes he would lose, but then he would only say:  “Well, if she didn’t wear a wedding ring she should have done so,” and would pay for the cigars we smoked.

He had some sort of fancy about their eyes which I could never quite understand.  He said that a woman who had been very close to a man, who had been part of him in any way, had nevermore the same look, and that the difference was perceptible to one who knew the thing.  I tested him more than once, and I found that he had never actually failed.  Sometimes the woman with the look had proved unmarried, but there were facts that made the difference.

One night Harlson and I were wandering about the city, mere driftwood, after a dinner, and our mood carried us into the haunts of those without the pale, not that we cared for any new emotion or excitement, but that we wanted to look at something outside the commonplace.  To me there might be, of course, some novelty in the things that might confront us, though to Harlson they were, at their utmost, but a reminiscence.  We went where a man alone was not in safe companionship, but there were enough who knew my companion well, and all was curious to me, without even the spice of care for self.

It chanced that at one period of the wandering, very late at night, or, rather, early morning, Harlson became hungry, and insisted upon entrance to a restaurant where were gathered the very refuse of the reckless and non-law-abiding, and I went with him, perforce, and saw a motley gathering.  There were all sorts of people there, from thief to pander, all save those who might retain a claim to faint respectability.  Harlson demanded comparative cleanliness at our table, and the food was fairly decent.  We ate, then smoked, and looked about us.

I have seen many people, and many strange faces, but never such a person nor such a face as of an old woman who sat at that early hour of the morning at a table near us.  The figure was a warped and withered caricature, the face that of a hag, a creature vixenish and viperish, and mean and crafty.  It was the face of a procuress of the lowest and most desperate type, of a deformed she-wolf of the slums, of the worst there is in all abandoned human nature, and Harlson was as interested as I was disgusted and repelled.  He noted the woman closely.