He pressed a button and rang a bell loudly. The responding waiter departed with orders for a whiskey and two lithias. Maud explained to Susan:
"Max used to be a prize-fighter. He was middleweight champion."
"I've been a lot of things in my days," said Max with pride.
"So I've heard," joked Maud. "They say they've got your picture at headquarters."
"That's neither here nor there," said Max surlily. "Don't get too flip." Susan drank her whiskey as soon as it came, and the glow rushed to her ghastly face. Said Max with great politeness:
"You're having a little neuralgia, ain't you? I see your face is swhole some."
"Yes," said Susan. "Neuralgia." Maud laughed hilariously. Susan herself had ceased to brood over the incident. In conventional lives, visited but rarely by perilous storms, by disaster, such an event would be what is called concise. But in life as it is lived by the masses of the people—life in which awful disease, death, maiming, eviction, fire, violent event of any and every kind, is part of the daily routine in that life of the masses there is no time for lingering upon the weathered storm or for bothering about and repairing its ravages. Those who live the comparatively languid, the sheltered life should not use their own standards of what is delicate and refined, what is conspicuous and strong, when they judge their fellow beings as differently situated. Nevertheless, they do—with the result that we find the puny mud lark criticizing the eagle battling with the hurricane.
When Susan and Maud were in the street again, Susan declared that she must have another drink. "I can't offer to pay for one for you," said she to Maud. "I've almost no money. And I must spend what I've got for whiskey before I—can—can—start in."
Maud began to laugh, looked at Susan, and was almost crying instead. "I can lend you a fiver," she said. "Life's hell—ain't it? My father used to have a good business—tobacco. The trust took it away from him—and then he drank—and mother, she drank, too. And one day he beat her so she died—and he ran away. Oh, it's all awful! But I've stopped caring. I'm stuck on Jim—and another little fellow he don't know about. For God's sake don't tell him or he'd have me pinched for doing business free. I get full every night and raise old Nick. Sometimes I hate Jim. I've tried to kill him twice when I was loaded. But a girl's got to have a backer with a pull. And Jim lets me keep a bigger share of what I make than some fellows. Freddie's pretty good too, they say—except when he's losing on the races or gets stuck on some actress that's too classy to be shanghaied—like you was—and that makes him cough up."
Maud went on to disclose that Jim usually let her have all she made above thirty dollars a week, and in hard weeks had sometimes let her beg off with fifteen. Said she: