“On what security?”
“I don’t mean that kind of—I don’t mean businesslike borrowing. I mean borrowing from friends. Friends. All these men——”
“Men! What men?”
“The men at the—at the places.” She had always pretended that she did not actually know he came by his livelihood as he did. She never said, “Gamblers’ Alley.” She refused to admit that daily he had disappeared within the narrow slit of lane that was really a Clark Street alley; that he had spent the hours there watching bits of pasteboard for a living. “The men you have known so many years.”
Grimly: “They’ve all been trying to borrow of me.”
“But Mike McDonald. Hankins. Varnell.” She cast pretense aside now. “Thousands. They’ve had thousands of dollars. All the money we brought with us to Chicago. Won’t they give some of it back?”
This he found engaging rather than irritating, as well he might have. He shouted with laughter as he always did at a fresh proof of her almost incredible naïveté. At times such as these he invariably would be impelled to caress her much as one laughs at a child and then fondles it delightedly after it has surprised one with an unexpected and charming trick. He would kiss the back of her neck and then her wide, flexible mouth, and she would push him away, bewildered and annoyed that this should be his reaction to what she had meant so seriously.
“Nola, you’re priceless! You’re a darling. There’s no one like you.” He went off again into a shout of laughter. “Give it back! McDonald, h’m? There’s an idea for you.”
“How can you act like that when you know how serious it is!”
“Serious! Why, damn it, it’s desperate. I tell you I’ll never have her come here and see us living like this. We’ll get out, first. . . . Say, Nola, what’s to prevent us getting out, anyway? Chicago’s no good any more. Why not get out of this! I’m sick of this town.”