I waited long for Jack Ballard, but he did not return and so I went out into the streets and walked rapidly for exercise down town in the general direction of Flynn's Gymnasium over on the East Side, where I proposed to meet Jerry later in the afternoon. I had kept no record of the time and when my appetite advised me that it was the luncheon hour, I looked at my watch. It was two o'clock. I sauntered into a cross street, finding at last a quiet place where I could eat and think in peace. "Dry-as-dust!" I was. Twelve years ago I had railed at the modern woman and learned my lesson from her. But now--! The years had swept madly past my sanctuary, license running riot. Sin stalked openly. The eyes of the women one met upon the streets were hard with knowledge. Nothing was sacred--nothing hidden from young or old. And men and women of wealth and tradition--I will not call them society, which is far too big a word for so small a thing--men and women born to lead and mold public thought and conduct, showed the way to a voluptuousness which rivaled tottering Rome.
And this was the world into which my sinless man had been liberated!
I smiled to myself a little bitterly. It was unfortunate that out of all the women in New York, Jerry should have fallen in love with the first hypocrite that had come his way, a follower of strange gods, cold, calculating, too selfish even to be sinful! Eheu! She was getting on my nerves. Analysis--always analysis! I could not let her be. She obsessed me as she had obsessed Jerry--a slender wisp of a thing that I could have broken in my fingers and would still, I think, unless reason returned.
I paid my bill and would have risen, but just at that moment through the door beside my table entered, to my bewilderment, Jerry himself and a girl. I was so amazed at seeing him in this place that I made no sound or motion and watched the pair pass without seeing me and take a table beyond a small palm tree just beside me, and when they were seated my amazement grew again, for I saw that his companion was the girl Una--Una Habberton who had called herself Smith. Their appearance at this moment together found me at a loss to know what to do. To get up and join them would interfere with a tête-à-tête which, whatever its planning, I deemed most fortunate; to get up and leave the room without being observed would have been impossible, for Jerry faced the door. So I sat debating the matter, watching the face of the girl and listening to the conversation, aware for a second time that I was playing the part of eavesdropper upon these two and now without justification. And yet no qualm of conscience troubled me. Brazen she may have seemed at Horsham Manor, but here in New York in her sober suit and hat she seemed to have lost something of her raffish demeanor, and there was a wholesomeness about her, a frankness in her smile, which was distinctly refreshing.