That set the actress to probing the girl's innocence—what she knew and what she did not. It had been many a day since Miss Connemora had had so much pleasure. "Well!" she finally said. "I never would have believed it—though I know these things are so. Now I'm going to teach you. Innocence may be a good thing for respectable women who are going to marry and settle down with a good husband to look after them. But it won't do at all—not at all, my dear!—for a woman who works—who has to meet men in their own world and on their own terms. It's hard enough to get along, if you know. If you don't—when you're knocked down, you stay knocked down."
"Yes—I want to learn," said Susan eagerly. "I want to know—everything!"
"You're not going back?" Mabel pointed toward the shore, to a home on a hillside, with a woman sewing on the front steps and children racing about the yard. "Back to that sort of thing?"
"No," replied Susan. "I've got nothing to go back to."
"Nonsense!"
"Nothing," repeated Susan in the same simple, final way. "I'm an outcast."
The ready tears sprang to Mabel's dissipated but still bright eyes. Susan's unconscious pathos was so touching. "Then I'll educate you. Now don't get horrified or scandalized at me. When you feel that way, remember that Mabel Connemora didn't make the world, but God. At least, so they say—though personally I feel as if the devil had charge of things, and the only god was in us poor human creatures fighting to be decent. I tell you, men and women ain't bad—not so damn bad—excuse me; they will slip out. No, it's the things that happen to them or what they're afraid'll happen—it's those things that compel them to be bad—and get them in the way of being bad—hard to each other, and to hate and to lie and to do all sorts of things."
The show boat drifted placidly down with the current of the broad Ohio. Now it moved toward the left bank and now toward the right, as the current was deflected by the bends—the beautiful curves that divided the river into a series of lovely, lake-like reaches, each with its emerald oval of hills and rolling valleys where harvests were ripening. And in the shadow of the awning Susan heard from those pretty, coarse lips, in language softened indeed but still far from refined, about all there is to know concerning the causes and consequences of the eternal struggle that rages round sex. To make her tale vivid, Mabel illustrated it by the story of her own life from girlhood to the present hour. And she omitted no detail necessary to enforce the lesson in life. A few days before Susan would not have believed, would not have understood. Now she both believed and understood. And nothing that Mabel told her—not the worst of the possibilities in the world in which she was adventuring—burned deep enough to penetrate beyond the wound she had already received and to give her a fresh sensation of pain and horror.
"You don't seem to be horrified," said Mabel.
Susan shook her head. "No," she said. "I feel—somehow I feel better."