“But you’d look sweet—upon the seat
Of a bicycle built—”
The odor came from Jim’s coat.
It said suddenly, “Lorraine Schoonmaker,” as plainly as Jim’s lips could have said it. To smell it was to see the girl standing behind the counter in the Gray Dome Dry Goods Company’s store. Probably there was no one in town who would have failed to connect her with that perfume.
A knife seemed to unfold inside of Rosie. It cut her song off in the middle of the line and brought her upright in her chair with a gasp.
“What’s the matter?” Jim said, startled.
She got to her feet. She almost came straight out with it. That would have been like her. It was what she wanted to do. But for the first time in many years she was afraid. She stared at Jim with deep revulsion. Suddenly he was part of an elemental horror that she had climbed out of long ago and that now was closing around her again.
“I—I hadn’t ought to’ve sung that,” she said thickly. “It—makes me think too much of the old days,” and went stumbling off to the bedroom.
He followed her and stood around, saying things to comfort her, and finally she pretended that her mood had passed. But when she lay still at last by his side and thought about Lorraine Schoonmaker, hard lines pulled at the corners of her mouth that hadn’t been there for fifteen years. Long after all traces of it had vanished, she fancied that the air was faintly touched with the perfume of orange flowers.
“Women” would have been bad enough, but he would have tired of them and come back. There’d be no coming back from this girl of twenty-one, clever and hard of mind and soft and pink of body, with the first taste of what money could do fresh in her mouth.
Men didn’t come back from the Schoonmaker women. Behind Lorraine, with her sleek black pomaded hair, her short tight pussy-willow taffeta one piece gown, her chiffon stockings and high-heeled satin pumps with rhinestone buckles, her vanity case almost as big as a traveling bag, her jeweled wrist watch and swinging bead girdle, Rosie saw Ally Schoonmaker, her older sister, who had married Timothy Bund practically on his death-bed for his house and his shares in the North Star Mine. And behind Ally, up the ladder of the years a rung or two, Dora Schoonmaker, breaking up the Watson home when Mike Watson’s mine began to pay, and somehow juggling him into a divorce from the woman who had seen him through the lean grim years of penury and into marriage with her and then carrying him off East. And Effie, the oldest of the four, who had run away with Perce Williams, nearly two decades her junior, when he came into his father’s money, and held him grimly to her side ever since.