Side by side with Haldane stood a creature whose dishevelled, rusty hair, blotched and bloated features, wanton, cunning, restless eyes, combined perfectly to form the head of the mythological Harpy. It required little effort of the imagination to believe that her foul, bedraggled dress concealed the "wings and talons of the vulture." Being still unsteady from her night's debauch, she leaned against the young man, and when he shrank in loathing away, she, to annoy him, clasped him in her arms, to the uproarious merriment of the miscellaneous crowd that is ever present at a police court. Haldane broke away from her grasp with such force as to make quite a commotion, and at the same time said loudly and fiercely to the officer who had arrested him: "You may have power to take me to jail, but you have not, and shall not have, the right nor the power to subject me to such indignities."
"Silence there! Keep order in the court!" commanded the judge.
The officer removed his prisoner a little further apart from the others, growling as he did so: "If you don't like your company, you should have kept out of it."
Even in his overwhelming anxiety and distress Haldane could not forbear giving a few curious glances at his companions. He had dropped out of his old world into a new one, and these were its inhabitants. In their degradation and misery he seemed to see himself and his future reflected. What had the policeman said?--"Your company," and with a keener pang than he had yet experienced he realized that this was his company, that he now belonged to the criminal classes. He who yesterday had the right to speak to Laura Romeyn, was now herded with drunkards, thieves, and prostitutes; he who yesterday could enter Mrs. Arnot's parlor, might now as easily enter heaven. As the truth of his situation gradually dawned upon him, he felt as if an icy hand were closing upon his heart.
But little time, however, was given him for observation or bitter revery. With the rapid and routine-like manner of one made both callous and expert by long experience, the magistrate was sorting and disposing of the miserable waifs. Now he has before him the inmates of a "disorderly house," upon which a "raid" had been made the previous night. What is that fair young girl with blue eyes doing among those coarse-featured human dregs, her companions? She looks like a white lily that has been dropped into a puddle. Perhaps that delicate and attractive form is but a disguise for the Harpy's wings and claws. Perhaps a gross, bestial spirit is masked by her oval Madonna-like face. Perhaps she is the victim of one upon whom God will wreak his vengeance forever, though society has for him scarcely a frown.