Madeline’s aunt didn’t believe one word of her niece’s story. Madeline quarreled haughtily and scornfully with her, but in her own heart she couldn’t blame her. She wouldn’t have believed it herself. Getting lost in a motor car with a millionaire! That was simply nonsense.
She lay down on the bed in her dismal little room, as close to despair as she was ever likely to be. One of the girls had come from Compson’s, and her aunt had said she didn’t know where Madeline was.
“I can never go back there!” she thought. “Never, never!”
She might have been mourning for a lost paradise. After all, it was as hard for her to lose her standing among her peers at the chophouse as for a duchess to lose prestige in the drawing-rooms of Mayfair. She had nothing else.
She neither expected nor wished to see Bradley again. He was a sinister mystery to her; she couldn’t understand him at all. She was convinced that he had got lost on purpose. The very fact of his not having tried to make love to her made the case all the more perturbing. He must have some deep design which she could not yet fathom.
He was bad. He drank. He went gladly to road houses where every one was bad, and drank, and danced improperly. His fascination was the fascination of a villain. His whole life must be a phantasmagoria of splendid evil.
As the room grew dark, she shuddered at the very thought of him. She dozed, and dreamed nightmares, and woke and cried and slept again. The blessed security of her honest, hard-working life was gone. She would have to give up her job. She couldn’t face the other girls again. Perhaps she was caught in one of those awful snares elaborately laid by millionaires for the daughters of the poor. Perhaps it was Bradley’s purpose to see that she never got another job—to hound her to the brink of starvation, that she might be obliged to listen to his evil proposals.
“I’d rather die!” she cried to herself with a sob.
There was not a soul in the world to assuage the heartsick young creature, no one to speak a word of common sense or solace. Her preposterous fears were terribly real to her. She had eaten nothing all day. She was exhausted, frightened, inimitably wretched.
She heard her aunt moving about in the kitchen. She knew that nothing on earth could induce the older woman to bring her even a cup of tea, and nothing could persuade her to ask for it.