tongue, a numb and desperate constraint, all that he could mutter thickly was: “I—I walk.”
“But where?” she said, a trifle more sharply, still looking at him with her glacial, curious smile. “That’s what I’d like to know. Where do you go? What do you see that’s so interesting? What do you find that’s worth staying up all night for? Where do you go when you make these expeditions?” she again demanded. “Up to Broadway?”
“Yes,” he mumbled thickly, “—sometimes—and—and sometimes—I go down town.”
“Down town?” the cool incisive inflection of the voice, the glacial grey-green of the eye bored through him like a steel-blue drill. “Downtown where? To the Battery?”
“Y-y-yes—sometimes…. And—and along the East Side, too,” he mumbled.
“Where?” she cried sharply, smiling, but manifestly impatient with his mumbled, tongue-tied answers. “Oh—the East Side!” she cried again, with the air of glacial enlightenment. “—In the tenement section!”
“Yes—yes,” he stumbled on desperately, “—and along Fourteenth Street and Second Avenue—and Grand Street—and—and Delancey—and—and the Bowery—and all the docks and piers and all,” he blurted out, conscious of Joel’s eager, radiant smile of hopeful kindness, and the miserable clown he was making of himself.
“But I should think you would find all that dreadfully boring.” Mrs. Pierce’s voice was now tinged with cool and mild surprise. “And awfully ugly, isn’t it?… I mean, if you’ve got to prowl around at night, you might hunt for something a little more attractive than the East Side, couldn’t you?… After all, we still have Riverside Drive—I suppose even that has changed a great deal, but in my childhood it was quite a lovely place. Or the Park?” she said, a little more kindly and persuasively. “If you want to take a walk before going to bed, why, wouldn’t it be better to take it in the Park—where you could see an occasional tree or a little grass?… Or even Fifth Avenue and around Washington Square—that used to be quite pleasant? But the East Side! Heavens! My dear boy, what on earth do you ever find in a place like that to interest you?”
He was absolutely speechless, congealed, actually terrified by the haughty magnificence, the glacial and almost inhuman detachment, of her
