Do you remember that fat old brewer that use to come hanging around you? Well, he blew in while I was dancing the other night, and claimed to be a long lost friend. He come down every night for about a week, and then tried that old gag of putting some money for me in a wheat deal or some such thing where it was tails I win and heads you lose. I told him I was on to that chorus trick, and wasn't at all crazy about it. You see, whether he won or lost he would have handed me over three or four hundred dollars and kinda felt he owned me body and soul. I simply laughed at him, and said with a voice of a Wall Street broker, "Man, I am making so much money that it is quite impossible to find investments for my income, so I am planting it around the yard in tin cans." I even offered to make him a loan if business was bad. He went away in a huff, and I got a call-down from the manager because the brewer owns the bar the same as he does all the other saloons around our district, and the saloon-keeper is only in on a percentage. If the temperance people would only go after the brewer and the distiller, instead of the poor devil of a saloon-keeper, they might do something worth while, cause there ain't one bar in twenty in New York that is owned by the man who keeps it.
Well, good-bye, I am going to dinner in a place in 39th Street where they say they have an awful pretty dancer. I am saving up my money, Kate, so when you come out, you will have enough to live on for awhile until you find out what you want to do. Now don't worry, and don't write me any more letters like that last one. Everything is fine and dandy. Billy is all right, and I am as happy as a clam and getting fat. I have put on two pounds in three months. I weigh 118 now, which is a lot for me, and if I keep on like this I will look like Taft one of these days.
I am coming down to see you next week, and I have got something for you. Oh, Kate, I am fond of you and I get just crazy to see you.
XIII
Dear Kate:
I have been working again. Mrs. Smith got at me about the dancing, not that she thinks the dancing is bad, but she don't like the places where I dance nor the people I have to be with, and she is dead sore at the rooming house where I live. She don't like the girls I float around with, and that hang around my room. I can't understand it, because they are all right, and I have known them kind of girls all my life. She came up to see me one afternoon, and there was half a dozen in the room, and the smoke was so thick you could cut it with a knife, and she cried after they left, and said a lot of rot about me being too good to throw my life away with them sort of people. She talked and she talked to me, and I thought I would try to work again, not but what dancing ain't work and there ain't nothing wrong with it either, but there is a hard crowd down at Kelley's, and sometimes it kinda makes me sick. She talked to me a lot about Billy, and said it will make a great difference in his life if he can look back to his folks as being respectable. I myself don't see why he should be any prouder of his aunt being a servant than he would be if she was a dancing girl, and I get thirty per for dancing, and only six little bucks for housework. I stayed awake two nights thinking about it, wondering if I was getting tough and didn't know it, cause things that I don't think nothing about at all, Mrs. Smith thinks awful, and she says that the longer you live in that kind of life and with people who have no "ideals"—whatever them is, one is just bound to go down. I don't want to go down, and I don't want to get so I will think crookedness is right, and that decent people are wrong, so I just piped it out to myself as I lay awake at night that I would give the honest work job another chance.
I answered an "ad" in the paper. I got a place up on West End Avenue. I stayed there two months, then I had bad luck again. I liked the place real well, and the people liked me, and I suppose I would have been there yet, if I hadn't of cut my hand, because, take it from me, Kate I am a dandy housekeeper and I like it too. I can't imagine nothing nicer than having a little home of your own and taking care of it yourself. It even give me a little thrill to walk into some body else's kitchen and see it all clean and nice, the dishes and the glasses shining, and the pretty white cloth on the table, and a bird singing in a cage before the window, and know that all looked so home-like cause I made it so. If somebody else's kitchen can make me feel that way, if I had one of my own, I suppose I'd just naturally bust. The woman I worked for was one of those sort of no-good women who ain't bad or who ain't good, who is just nothing. She didn't do a thing around the house, didn't even take care of her own clothes. She read a little in the morning, then went down town every afternoon of her life, either to the theatres or to the restaurants or shopping. Then at night as often as she could, she made her poor husband put on his dress clothes and go somewhere with her. They use to scrap a lot about it, as he was tired and generally wanted to put on a pair of old slippers and set and smoke and read. Sometimes I use to wonder what she done to earn her board, as she wasn't as much of a help as a wife of a crook generally is. Even you, Kate, used to pass the leather on when Jim pinched one, which was doing your share in buying your meal ticket. She was dippy on the dancing, and women used to come in the afternoon and dance with the victrola. I didn't let her know that I danced at first.
One night I was a cutting bread and the knife slipped and cut my hand between my thumb and first finger. The woman was awful nice about it, and kept me on for two weeks. It didn't seem to get no better and the doctor thinks I poisoned it. I didn't have the nerve to stay there without doing something, so one day when she and some of her friends were dancing like a lump of cheese, I told her I would learn her the dance if she wanted me to, and—gee, didn't those females work me after that! They didn't care nothing about the housework. It could go hang, but morning, night and noon I was a holding some fat lady or some tall lady or some short one from breaking her neck, as she tried to do the Castle Glide or the Maxixe. I must say my boss was generous, she was perfectly willing to loan me to all her friends and they grabbed after me like a cat after a mouse, cause they was getting five-dollar lessons for nothing. I stayed two weeks and I lost six pounds and my hand didn't heal none and I didn't see where I was doing any better being a private dancing teacher for a lot of fool women who really think no better than a lot of the girls I had to go with, but who only know how to say it better. Here I was working harder for six a week and at the same kind of work, than I would be if I was dancing at thirty, so I told the woman I must go. I spent all my money with the doctor and I didn't know what to do, as I didn't want to go back to my room. Mrs. Smith was awful nice and told me to come with her. I did and I am there now. My hand is a little better but I still can't do much work and have to keep it tied up. I can't wash dishes, nor do nothing where it will get wet.