Stopping to speak to her usual apple-boy, Muriel found herself noticing one nearby doorway’s hidden denizen. A prostitute prepared herself for business, for night. The woman already wore a shopgirl suit but, from her purse, she pulled a few final properties. This happened at six-thirty or so. The great male working force came pouring onto Chicago’s streets; unnumbered black bowler hats made an antlike carapace of bent advancing heads. Here came featureless husbands and bachelors blindly seeking some profitable use for the little energy not squeezed from them all day at office desks, counters, stools—such warrens, a kind of human stockyard. The far end of the street showed the great clear lake; the shadowed buildings made a blue-black trough, and down it, in this direction, poured the mass of ruddy faces, tonsured moustaches, white celluloid collars. In their buoyant voices—joking about beer and sporting wagers—Muriel heard a closing-hour longing she well knew. But, watchful, one hand idly touching apple stems, Miss Fraser tried imagining which of these men might be lonely or nearsighted enough to hire that woman yonder.

The whore was nearly Muriel’s age, though an overbold gift at face-painting made that easier to miss. Miss Fraser, shielded by the pyramid of apples, red and green, watched the woman square off with a doorway’s full-length mirror. She was plain, uncomplicated-looking, her hair the color of rust. From her black handbag she withdrew two handkerchiefs, folded them into triangular compresses, wedged these into her bodice. The whore posed, fluffing and resettling this side, then that. Her head cocked, judging in a way quite likable. By finding this mirrored entry to a bankrupt shoe store, she had secured such public privacy. For Muriel, this lent the scene its odd outlaw allure. The woman, without stealth, with a fatalistic kind of raptness, now daubed on rouge. The gesture looked as joyless and factual as medicating some paper cut. Then came the comedy of lipstick application: overriding a series of large flexed faces, this grimace comic, falling into a wide-mouthed comi-tragedy mope, then back to neutral-tragic.