“And you won’t go home?”
“Never in the world,” she said with almost fierce energy; then some thought made her laugh in the same way as before. Howard decided that she had not told him everything about her home life, even though she had rattled on as if there were nothing to conceal. He sat watching her, she looking straight before her, her small bare hands clasped in her lap. He was pitying her keenly—this child, at once stunted and abnormally developed, this stray from one of the classes that keeps their women sheltered; and here she was adrift, without any of those resources of experience which assist the girls of the tenements.
Her features were small, sensitive, regular. Her eyes were brown with lines of reddish gold raying from the pupils. Her chin and mouth were firm enough, yet suggested weakness through the passions. Her clear skin had the glow of youth and health upon its smooth surface. She was certainly beautiful and she certainly had magnetism.
“What do you think is going to become of you?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said, after a deep sigh. “A girl doesn’t have a fair chance. I don’t seem to be able to have any fun without getting into trouble. I don’t know what to think. It’s all so black. I wish I was dead.”
Her dreary tone put the deepest pathos into her words. Howard had seen despondency in youth before—had felt it himself. But there had always been a certain lightness in it. Here was a mere child who evidently thought, and thought with reason, that there was no hope for her; and her despair was not a passing cloud or storm, but a settled conviction.
“There doesn’t seem to be any chance for a young girl,” she repeated as if that phrase summed up all that was weighing upon her. And Howard feared that she, was right. Even the readiest of all commodities, advice, failed him. “What can she do?” he thought. “If she has no home, worth speaking of”—then he went on aloud:
“Haven’t you friends?”
She laughed again with that slight moving of the lips and with eyes mirthless. “Who wants me for a friend? Nobody’d think I was respectable. And I guess I’m not so very. There’s Nellie and her—friends. Oh, the girls join in with the men to drag other girls down. But I won’t do that. I don’t care what becomes of me—except that.”
“Why?” he asked, curious for her explanation of this aversion.