CHAPTER I
ENTER MR. FEUERSTEIN
On an afternoon late in April Feuerstein left his boarding-house in
East Sixteenth Street, in the block just beyond the eastern gates of
Stuyvesant Square, and paraded down Second Avenue.
A romantic figure was Feuerstein, of the German Theater stock
company. He was tall and slender, and had large, handsome features.
His coat was cut long over the shoulders and in at the waist to show his
lines of strength and grace. He wore a pearl-gray soft hat with rakish
brim, and it was set with suspicious carelessness upon bright blue, and
seemed to blazon a fiery, sentimental nature. He strode along, intensely
self-conscious, not in the way that causes awkwardness, but in the way
that causes a swagger. One had only to glance at him to know that he
was offensive to many men and fascinating to many women.