This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

rosy crimsons till her dormant involuntary soul awakes—a thing of old mellowed beauty, it may be—and is wafted on warm pretty vapory wings far from alleys, far from mops and scrubbing-brushes, far from thirty-five cents an hour, far from doorsteps—to fair sweet Isles of the Blest!

Nearing the last of her pint bottles she reels sideways on the doorstep: her bad hat cants forward: she sprawls about. The policeman on that beat to whom in that aspect she is a figure long familiar strolls toward her late in the night and looks at her with a lackluster eye. But Josephina is physically unaware of all this world. Her last pint bottle is gamely emptied, her inner sun's chromosphere burns like mad—but her body, unable to cope with the virile delectations new-risen within it, limply gives way.

A quaint picture, interesting to dwell on: her thick bathless body laid low in the darkened alley, with the empty pint bottles scattered on the paving-stones beside it—but her astral shape, lit by the subtle fires of alcohol, lifted high, high to remote elysiums. The policeman calls the 'wagon' and Josephina is taken up by several ungentle hands and tossed into it like a sack of coal. They take her to the city jail and lock her in a cell. The next morning she stands jaded and morbidly intoxicated before a police