The woman had opened the door, and a colored servant, half dressed, with a broom in her hand, came slouching down the passage.  Beatrice turned and fled out of the greasy, noisome atmosphere, down the wooden, uneven steps, out into the ugly street.  She turned toward the nearest elevated as though by instinct, but when she came to the bottom of the stairs she stopped short with a little groan.  She knew very well that she had not a nickel to pay the fare.  Her pockets were empty.  All day she had eaten nothing, and her last coin had gone for the car which had brought her back from Broadway.  And here she was on the other side of New York, in the region of low-class lodging houses, with the Bowery between her and Broadway.  She had neither the strength nor the courage to walk.  With a half-stifled sob she took off her one remaining ornament, a cheap enameled brooch, and entered a pawnbroker’s shop close to where she had been standing.

“Will you give me something on this, please?” she asked, desperately.

A man who seemed to be sorting a pile of ready-made coats, paused in his task for a moment, took the ornament into his hand, and threw it contemptuously upon the counter.

“Not worth anything,” he answered.

“But it must be worth something,” Beatrice protested.  “I only want a very little.”

Something in her voice compelled the man’s attention.  He looked at her white face.

“What’s the trouble?” he inquired.

“I must get up to Fifth Avenue somehow,” she declared.  “I can’t walk and I haven’t a nickel.”

He pushed the brooch back to her and threw a dime upon the counter.

“Well,” he said, “you don’t look fit to walk, and that’s a fact, but the brooch isn’t worth entering up.  There’s a dime for you.  Now git, please, I’m busy.”

Beatrice clutched the coin and, almost forgetting to thank him, found her way up the iron stairs on to the platform of the elevated.  Soon she was seated in the train, rattling and shaking on its way through the slums into the heart of the wonderful city.  There was only one thing left for her to try, a thing which she had had in her mind for days.  Yet she found herself, even now she was committed to it, thinking of what lay before her with something like black horror.  It was her last resource, indeed.  Strong though she was, she knew by many small signs that her strength was almost at an end.  The days and weeks of “disappointments, the long fruitless trudges from office to office, the heart-sickness of constant refusals, poor food, the long fasts, had all told their tale.  She was attractive enough still.  Her pallor seemed to have given her a wonderful delicacy.  The curve of her lips and the soft light in her gray eyes, were still as potent as ever.  When she thought, though, what a poor asset her appearance had been, the color flamed in her cheeks.

In Broadway she made her way to a very magnificent block of buildings, and passing inside took the lift to the seventh floor.  Here she got out and knocked timidly at a glass-paneled door, on which was inscribed the name of Mr. Anthony Cruxhall.  A very superior young man bade her enter and inquired her business.