This maddening feeling of self-hate and contempt stayed with her all that day. It made stiflingly hideous and sinister, to her brooding eyes, the over-furnished woman’s pool-room which had once been Penfield’s own, where she counted out her money and placed her bet on the Duke of Kendall. The broken-spirited and hard-faced women who waited about the operator’s wicket, the barrenness and malignity of their lives, the vainly muffled squalidness of that office of envenomed Chance, the abortive lust for gold without labor, the empty and hungry eyes that waited and watched the figure-covered blackboard, the wolf-like ears that pricked up at the report of some belated prey in the distance—it all filled Frances with a new and disheartening hatred of herself and the life into which she had drifted.
“Oh, God!” she prayed silently, yet passionately, while the little sounder in the operator’s stall clicked and sang; “Oh, God, may it turn out that this shall be the last!”
Listlessly she read the messages, as the report for the fifth Aqueduct event of the afternoon began to flash in and the announcer cried out, “They’re off!” Dreamily she interpreted the snatches of information as they came in over the wire: “Scotch Heather leads, with White-Legs second!” “Scotch Heather still leading at the quarter, and Heart’s Desire pressing White-Legs close.” “Heart’s Desire leads at the half, with the Duke of Kendall second.” “White-Legs, the Duke of Kendall, and Heart’s Desire bunched at the turn.” “Duke of Kendall holds the rail, with Heart’s Desire and White-Legs locked for second place.” Then, for a minute or two, silence took possession of the little brass sounder. Then thrilled out the news: “The Duke of Kendall wins!”
Frances quietly waited, amid the hubbub and crowding and commotion, until the wire report had been duly verified and the full returns posted.
Then, when the little window of the paying clerk slid open for the making of settlements, she deposited her ticket, and quietly asked to have it in hundreds.
Her slip read for two hundred dollars on the Duke of Kendall at odds of fifty to one.
“I guess this shop shuts up mighty soon, on this kind of runnin’,” said the paying clerk sourly, after consulting with his chief, and flinging her money through his little wicket at her. She counted it methodically, amid the gasps and little envious murmurs of the women at her elbow, and then hurried from the room.
“Well, you ought to be happier-looking!” snarled a painted woman with solitaire diamond earrings, as Frances hurried down the half-lighted stairway to the street.
There the woman who ought to be happy signaled moodily for a taxi-cab, and drove straight to Durkin’s apartments.
She flung the pile of bills at him, in a heap before his astonished eyes.