Her walks in Grand Street and the Bowery, repelling and capricious though she was with her alternating moods of cold moroseness and sardonic and mocking gayety, were bringing her in a good sum of money for that region. Sometimes as much as twenty dollars a week, rarely less than twelve or fifteen. And despite her drinking and her freehandedness with her fellow-professionals less fortunate and with the street beggars and for tenement charities, she had in her stockings a capital of thirty-one dollars.
She avoided the tough places, the hang-outs of the gangs. She rarely went alone into the streets at night—and the afternoons were, luckily, best for business as well as for safety. She made no friends and therefore no enemies. Without meaning to do so and without realizing that she did so, she held herself aloof without haughtiness through sense of loneliness, not at all through sense of superiority. Had it not been for her scarlet lips, a far more marked sign in that region than anywhere uptown, she would have passed in the street for a more or less respectable woman—not thoroughly respectable; she was too well dressed, too intelligently cared for to seem the good working girl.
On one of the few nights when she lingered in the little back room of the saloon a few doors away at the corner, as she entered the dark passageway of the tenement, strong fingers closed upon her throat and she was borne to the floor. She knew at once that she was in the clutch of one of those terrors of tenement fast women, the lobbygows—men who live by lying in wait in the darkness to seize and rob the lonely, friendless fast woman. She struggled—and she was anything but weak. But not a sound could escape from her tight-pressed throat. Soon she became unconscious.
One of the workingmen, returning drunk from the meeting of the union, in the corner saloon, stumbled over her, gave her a kick in his anger. This roused her; she uttered a faint cry. "Thought it was a man," mumbled he, dragging her to a sitting position. He struck a match. "Oh—it's you! Don't make any noise. If my old woman came out, she'd kill us both."
"Never mind me," said Susan. "I was only stunned."
"Oh, I thought it was the booze. They say you hit it something fierce."
"No—a lobbygow." And she felt for her stockings. They were torn away from her garters. Her bosom also was bare, for the lobbygow had searched there, also.
"How much did he get?"
"About thirty-five."
"The hell he did! Want me to call a cop?"