"You've got a lot in you," continued he. "That's my opinion, and I'm a fair judge of yearlings. You're liable to land somewhere some day when you've struck your gait. . . . If I had the mon I'd be tempted to set you up in a flat and keep you all to myself. But I can't afford it. It takes a lot of cash to keep me going. . . . You'll do well. You won't have to bother with any but classy gents. I'll see that the cops put you wise when there's anyone round throwing his money away. And I can help you, myself. I've got quite a line of friends among the rich chappies from Fifth Avenue. And I always let my girls get the benefit of it."
My girls! Susan's mind, recovering now from its daze, seized upon this phrase. And soon she had fathomed how these two young men came to be so luxuriously dressed, so well supplied with money. She had heard of this system under which the girls in the streets were exploited as thoroughly as the girls in the houses. In all the earth was there anyone who was suffered to do for himself or herself without there being a powerful idle someone else to take away all the proceeds but a bare living? Helpless! Helpless!
"How many girls have you?" she asked.
"Jealous already!" And he laughed and blew a cloud of smoke into her face.
She took the quarters he directed—a plain clean room two flights up at seven dollars a week, in a furnished room house on West Forty-third Street near Eighth Avenue. She was but a few blocks from where she and Rod had lived. New York—to a degree unrivaled among the cities of the world—illustrates in the isolated lives of its never isolated inhabitants how little relationship there is between space and actualities of distance. Wherever on earth there are as many as two human beings, one may see an instance of the truth. That an infinity of spiritual solitude can stretch uncrossable even between two locked in each other's loving arms! But New York's solitudes, its separations, extend to the surface things. Susan had no sense of the apparent nearness of her former abode. Her life again lay in the same streets; but there again came the sense of strangeness which only one who has lived in New York could appreciate. The streets were the same; but to her they seemed as the streets of another city, because she was now seeing in them none of the things she used to see, was seeing instead kinds of people, aspects of human beings, modes of feeling and acting and existing of which she used to have not the faintest knowledge. There were as many worlds as kinds of people. Thus, though we all talk to each other as if about the same world, each of us is thinking of his own kind of world, the only one he sees. And that is why there can never be sympathy and understanding among the children of men until there is some approach to resemblance in their various lots; for the lot determines the man.
The house was filled with women of her own kind. They were allowed all privileges. There was neither bath nor stationary washstand, but the landlady supplied tin tubs on request. "Oh, Mr. Palmer's recommendation," said she; "I'll give you two days to pay. My terms are in advance. But Mr. Palmer's a dear friend of mine."
She was a short woman with a monstrous bust and almost no hips. Her thin hair was dyed and frizzled, and her voice sounded as if it found its way out of her fat lips after a long struggle to pass through the fat of her throat and chest. Her second chin lay upon her bosom in a soft swollen bag that seemed to be suspended from her ears. Her eyes were hard and evil, of a brownish gray. She affected suavity and elaborate politeness; but if the least thing disturbed her, she became red and coarse of voice and vile of language. The vile language and the nature of her business and her private life aside, she would have compared favorably with anyone in the class of those who deal—as merchants, as landlords, as boarding-house keepers—with the desperately different classes of uncertain income. She was reputed rich. They said she stayed on in business to avoid lonesomeness and to keep in touch with all that was going on in the life that had been hers from girlhood.
"And she's a mixer," said Maud to Susan. In response to Susan's look of inquiry, she went on to explain, "A mixer's a white woman that keeps a colored man." Maud laughed at Susan's expression of horror. "You are a greenie," she mocked. "Why, it's all the rage. Nearly all the girls do—from the headliners that are kept by the young Fifth Avenue millionaires down to nine out of ten of the girls of our set that you see in Broadway. No, I'm not lying. It's the truth. I don't do it—at least, not yet. I may get round to it."
After the talk with Maud about the realities of life as it is lived by several hundred thousand of the inhabitants of Manhattan Island Susan had not the least disposition to test by defiance the truth of Freddie Palmer's plain statement as to his powers and her duties. He had told her to go to work that very Sunday evening, and Jim had ordered Maud to call for her and to initiate her. And at half-past seven Maud came. At once she inspected Susan's swollen face.
"Might be a bit worse," she said. "With a veil on, no one'd notice it."