While the man hid
beneath a window on the ground floor, a woman wonderfully dressed and
very beautiful raised the sash from the inside and dropped her bouquet
down into the man's hand, and he nodded and stuck it under his coat
and ran off with it.
"I call that, now, a really curious thing to see. But I have never
come across anything like it, and I have been in every part of this
big city, and at every hour of the night and morning, and I am not
lacking in imagination either, but no captured maidens have ever
beckoned to me from barred windows nor 'white hands waved from a
passing hansom.' Balzac and De Musset and Stevenson suggest that they
have had such adventures, but they never come to me. It is all
commonplace and vulgar, and always ends in a police court or with a
'found drowned' in the North River."
McGowan, who had fallen into a doze behind the bar, woke suddenly and
shivered and rubbed his shirt-sleeves briskly. A woman knocked at the
side door and begged for a drink "for the love of heaven," and the man
who tended the grill told her to be off. They could hear her feeling
her way against the wall and cursing as she staggered out of the
alley. Three men came in with a hack driver and wanted everybody to
drink with them, and became insolent when the gentlemen declined, and
were in consequence hustled out one at a time by McGowan, who went to
sleep again immediately, with his head resting among the cigar boxes
and pyramids of glasses at the back of the bar, and snored.
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