“Oh, not exactly. It means—it means—the first place I fetch up.”
“The first place you fetch up may be the police-station, if the things you said just now are true.”
“The police-station is safe, anyways.”
“And you think the place I’d take you to wouldn’t be. Well, you’re wrong. It’ll be as safe as a church for as long as you like to stay; and when you want to go—lots of money to go with.”
Facing away from him toward the city, she said over her shoulder: “There’s things money couldn’t pay you for. Bein’ looked down on is one.”
She was about to walk on, but he sprang after her, catching her by the sleeve.
“Look here! Be a sport. You’ve got the chance of your lifetime. It’ll mean no more to you than a part they’d give you in pictures—just a rôle—and pay you a lot better.”
She was not blind to the advantages he laid before her. True, it might be what she qualified as “bull” to get her into a trap; only she didn’t believe it. This man with the sick mind and anguished face was none 41 of the soft-spoken fiends whose business it is to ensnare young girls. She knew all about them from living with Judson Flack, and couldn’t be mistaken. This fellow might be crazy, but he was what he said. If he said he wouldn’t do her any harm, he wouldn’t. If he said he would pay her well, he would. The main question was as to whether or not, just for the sake of getting something to eat and a place to sleep, she could deliberately put herself in a position in which the man who had married her would have gone to the devil because he had married her.
As he held her by the sleeve looking down at her, and she, half turned, was looking up at him, this was the battle she was fighting. Hitherto her impulse had been to run away from the scorn of her inferiority; now she was asking herself what would happen if she took up its challenge and fought it on its own ground. What if I do? was the way the question framed itself, but aloud she made it.
“If I said I would, what would happen first?”