"Pretty good, professor, pretty good." The whole conversation was as stereotyped as the act which would follow it. Sometimes Jimmy wished that just once the madame would sneer at him, or the professor be grouchy, but they never were.
Lydia came down the stairs, her wrapper as dirty and unkempt as it always was. He wondered if she had a succession of these wrappers all equally dilapidated, or if she owned just one which she managed to keep looking the same way all the time.
Jimmy wished too, that Lydia were a little older. It seemed somehow a little indecent for her to be only forty. A child like that should not be forced to make a living the way she had to, but then they were all about her age. Jimmy had shopped around, tried to find an older woman but had been forced back into Lydia's arms. After all, she had been the one Father selected for him and good old dad knew best.
She said, "Come on upstairs honey lamb."
He followed her dolefully, averting his eyes from her full breasts which were altogether too prominent through the tight cloth of the wrapper.
Her room looked as if it had not been cleaned since the previous month. Stuck to the mirror was the picture of The Grandfather that always embarrassed him. The stern old eyes should not be forced to look down on the scenes in this room. Jimmy had tried to turn the picture to the wall one time, but Lydia had become hysterical and he had given up. As a matter of fact it was only after a long argument and an increase in fee that Jimmy had been able to force her to turn out the light in the room when they did—what they did.
The old brass bed jingled just as embarrassingly as ever when he sat down on the edge of it to remove his shoes. It was only by keeping his eyes on his stockinged feet that he was able to avoid looking at Lydia who had dropped her wrapper to the floor and was now shamelessly considering herself in front of the mirror that lined the whole wall.
That had been the main reason he had insisted on the light being extinguished. The combination of the wall of mirror, the ceiling mirror and the searching eyes of The Grandfather were just more than he could bear.
There was no use, he knew, in asking Lydia not to look at her n..e body. She had told him many times that she enjoyed doing it; there was no law against it and what was he going to do about it?
Of course there was a law against women admiring themselves in any way, let alone n..e and in front of a mirror, but the law, of course, did not apply to p.........s.