three
in the morning
They crossed the city to Jap Town and its writhing streets , its dark alleys and stairways lost up the hillsides . They smiled at black-eyed children , and found a Japanese restaurant , and tried to dine on raw fish and huge shrimps and roots soaked in a very fair grade of light-medium motor oil . With Milt for guide , Claire discovered a Christianity that was not of candles and shifting lights and insinuating music , nor of carpets and large pews and sound oratory , but of hoboes blinking in rows , and girls in gospel bonnets , and little silver and crimson placards of Bible texts . They stopped on a corner to listen to a Pentecostal brother , to an I. W. W. speaker , to a magnificent negro who boomed in an operatic baritone that the Day of Judgment was coming on April 11 , 1923 , at three in the morning . In the streets of Jap Town , in cheap motion-picture theaters , in hotels for transient workmen , she found life , running swift and eager and many-colored ; and it seemed to her that back in the house of four-posters and walls of subdued gray , life was smothered in the very best pink cotton-batting . Milt 's delight in every picturesque dark corner , and the colloquial eloquence of the street-orators , stirred her . And when she saw a shopgirl caress the hand of a slouching beau in threadbare brown , her own hand slipped into Milt 's and clung there .