But each time she had withdrawn in terror, her breath coming in little gasps of fear, every nerve rigid. Only her experiences which had brought to her such misery saved her, they and Petit Jean. She feared the possibility of letting herself be hurt again. Better anything than that, she whispered often to herself when alone in her room at night. And after each temptation she plunged with doubled zeal into her work, seeking to find an opiate there which would absorb the restless urge within her body.
When even work could not dull the ceaseless desires she felt, she would often walk at night through to her unknown and queer sections of the city, peering into doorways, watching the ways of the varied peoples that make of New York a world within itself, packed with races representative of every nook of the world. She rambled through districts where no word except Spanish was heard, ate in tiny restaurants where the faces were all long and brown and where the food was spiced with condiments whose name she did not know but which she was certain had come all the way from Spain. As she ate she listened to soft-throated guitars and love-burdened songs sung with the rich amorousness of a nation of love-makers. She walked past rows of redbrick houses with trellised balconies and beautiful Moorish oriels, past houses reminiscent of the Alhambra, through streets that made it impossible for her to believe she yet was in New York.
Through streets where naught but gaily clad Gipsies with brightly coloured dresses and midnight-black hair, with sparkling yet mysterious eyes and gold necklaces and bracelets, were seen. She loved the touches of colour they gave to rows of dilapidated and abandoned stores through the hanging of vivid strips of Turkish gauzes and calicoes across the dusty windows, the thronging of the streets of lovemaking young girls and boys, of surprisingly agile old women and stalwart men with fierce and terrifyingly strange faces. Or perhaps she wandered on the lower East Side through streets packed from curb to curb with Jews, arguing,