Miss Cross turned to me. “I tell you how I feel about Christianity. If a lot of these educated college professors and lawyers and people like that, when they read all the books they do and are smart as they are—if Christianity is good enough for them, it's good enough for me!”
Jacobs was so disgusted that he left.
Whereat Edna freed her soul of all the things she wanted to say about hell and punishment for sins. She went too far for Miss Cross. Edna spoke of thieves and murderers and evildoers in general, and what they ought to get in both this world and the next. Quite a group had collected by this time.
Then Miss Cross turned to us all and said: “We're in no position to pass judgment on people that do wrong. Look at us. Here we are, girls what have everything. We got nice homes, enough to eat and wear, we have 'most everything in the world we want. We don't know what it's like to be tempted, 'cause we're so fortunate. An' I say we shouldn't talk about people who go wrong.”
That—in a laundry.
And only Edna seemed not to agree.
To-day at lunch the subject got around to matrimony. Eleanor said: “Any girl can get married, if she wants to so bad she'll take any old thing, but who wants to take any old thing?”
“Sure,” I added, cockily. “Who wants to pick up with anyone they can vamp in the Subway?”
Whereupon I get sat upon and the line of argument was interesting. Thus it ran:
After all, why wasn't a man a girl vamped in the Subway the safest kind? Where did working girls get a chance to meet men, anyhow? About the only place was the dance hall, and goodness knows what kind of men you did meet at a dance hall. They were apt to be the kind to make questionable husbands; like as not they were “sports.” But the Subway! Now there you were more likely to pick up with the dependable kind. Every girl at the table knew one or several married couples whose romances had begun on the Subway, and “every one of 'em turned out happy.” One girl told of a man she could have vamped the Sunday before in the Subway, but he was too sportily dressed and she got scared and quit in the middle. The other girls all approved her conduct. Each expressed deep suspicion of the “sporty” man. Each supported the Subway romance.