Jimmy hadn't overestimated his knowledge of little Alec McEwen's orbit.
They walked together to the corner of Clark and Randolph Streets and,
working radially from there, in the third bar they found him.
Even before this, however, Rodney regretted that he hadn't let Jimmy do
the job alone. He was not an habitue of the sumptuous bars of the Loop,
and the voices of the men he found in them, the sort of men they were,
and the sort of things they talked about found raw nerves all over him.
On another errand, he realized, he wouldn't have minded. But it seemed
as if Rose herself were somehow soiled by the necessity of visiting
places like this in search of information about her.
The feeling he had come back with from that down-state town to which he
had fled, that she was in a miry pit from which, at any cost, she must
be saved, had been a good deal weakened during the ten days that had
intervened since then. Her having sent back that hundred dollars; what
Portia had said about her courage; Harriet's notion that a stage career,
if properly managed, was something one could at least pretend not to be
ashamed of; and, most lately, what Jimmy Wallace had said about the New
York director who thought she had a future--all these things had
contributed to the result.
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