He hesitated to question that coarse man, even to mention Ida May
Bostwick's name to him. The waiter had misinterpreted his first
remark about the waitresses. The proprietor might hold any question
he asked regarding Ida May against the record of the violet-eyed
girl, if by any wild possibility that should be her name. There was
time still, he thought, to find her at her lodgings before she
started for the restaurant, if she worked here.
So Tunis paid his check and strode forth. The lodging of Ida May
Bostwick was not in this neighborhood, of course, not even in the
West End. In fact, it was in the South End, in one of those streets
running more or less parallel to lower Shawmut Avenue. He took a car
in the subway and got off near the address Prudence Ball had given
him.
To the mind of the Cape man, used as he was to the open spaces of
both sea and land, these dingy blocks of brick houses, three and
four stories in height, all quite alike in smoke and squalor and
even in the pattern of the net curtains at their parlor windows,
made as dreary a picture as he had ever imagined. He thought of that
pale, slender, violet-eyed girl coming back to this ugly block at
night, after long hours at the restaurant, having to look forward to
nothing more beautiful, in all probability, inside the house where
she lodged.
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