"No," replied Susan, who was on her feet again. "What's the use?"
"Those damn cops!" cursed the workingman. "They'd probably pinch you—or both of us. Ten to one the lobbygows divide with them."
"I didn't mean that," said Susan. The police were most friendly and most kind to her. She was understanding the ways of the world better now, and appreciated that the police themselves were part of the same vast system of tyranny and robbery that was compelling her. The police made her pay because they dared not refuse to be collectors. They bound whom the mysterious invisible power compelled them to bind; they loosed whom that same power bade them loose. She had no quarrel with the police, who protected her from far worse oppressions and oppressors than that to which they subjected her. And if they tolerated lobbygows and divided with them, it was because the overshadowing power ordained it so.
"Needn't be afraid I'll blow to the cop," said the drunken artisan. "You can damn the cops all you please to me. They make New York worse than Russia."
"I guess they do the best they can—like everybody else," said the girl wearily.
"I'll help you upstairs."
"No, thank you," said she. Not that she did not need help; but she wished no disagreeable scene with the workingman's wife who might open the door as they passed his family's flat.
She went upstairs, the man waiting below until she should be safe—and out of the way. She staggered into her room, tottered to the bed, fell upon it. A girl named Clara, who lived across the hall, was sitting in a rocking-chair in a nightgown, reading a Bertha Clay novel and smoking a cigarette. She glanced up, was arrested by the strange look in Susan's eyes.
"Hello—been hitting the pipe, I see," said she. "Down in
Gussie's room?"
"No. A lobbygow," said Susan.