"What made you decide that?"
"I've done a lot of thinking since you came into this room. And for a long time I've been doing a lot of thinking. I don't do things Coke Whelan's way. I took pity on him, once. But I'm getting tired of trying to keep him up when he insists on dropping lower, lower and lower every day. Don't imagine, because you've got certain ideas of me and my life, that I haven't common sense, that I can't see what this other sort of thing leads to. I've seen too many of them, and how they all ended. I may have been mixed up with some strange company in my day, but I want you to know that I've kept my hands clean!"
She had risen by this time and was moving restlessly about the room.
"Do you suppose I'd ever be satisfied to be one of those painted Broadway dolls and let my brain dry up like a lemon on a pantry shelf? I couldn't if I wanted to. I couldn't, although I can see how easy it makes everything. I tell you, a woman with a reputation like mine has got to pay, and keep on paying. She's got to pay twice over for the decencies of life. She's got to pay twice over for protection. Unless you're respectable you can't have respectable people about you. You've got to watch every one in your circle, watch them always, like a hawk. You've got to watch every step you take, and every man you meet—and sometimes you get tired of it all."
She sat down, in the midst of her febrile torrent of words, and looked at me out of clouded and questioning eyes. I knew, as I met that troubled gaze, so touched with weariness and rebellion, that she was speaking the truth. I could see truth written on her face. I tried to imagine myself in her place, I tried to see life as she had seen it during those past years, which no charity could translate into anything approaching the beautiful. And much as I might have wished it, I could utter no emptiest phrase of consolation. Our worlds seemed too hopelessly wide apart for any common view-point.
"What are you going to do?" I asked, humiliated by the inadequacy of the question even as I uttered it.
"I'm going to get away from it. I'm going to get away where I can breathe in peace. Oh, believe me, I can be irreproachable without even an effort. I want to be. I prefer it. I've found how much easier it makes life. It's not my past I've been afraid of. It's that one drug-soaked maniac, that poor helpless thing who knows that if I step away from him he daren't round a street-corner without being arrested."
She stopped suddenly and the color ebbed out of her face. Then I saw her slowly rise to her feet and look undecidedly about the four corners of the room. Then she turned to me. Her eyes seemed ridiculously terrified.
"He's come!" she said, in little more than a whisper. "He's here now!"
The door opened before I could speak. But even before the mummy-faced man I had left at the café table the night before could stride into the room, the woman in front of me sank back into her chair. Over her face came a change, a veil, a quickly coerced and smiling-lipped blankness that reminded me of a pastoral stage-drop shutting out some grim and moving tragedy.