“You mean I’m not good enough. Then why have you told me I’m good?”
“You’re too good to spoil.”
“But I’m spoiling now.”
“No: you’re learning.”
She cried piteously and when, surprisingly, that did not move him, she sulked and refused to eat and managed to make herself so unwell that work was out of the question and Mrs. Butterworth was guilty of disloyalty to Walter.
“She’ll fret herself into a decline,” she said. “You’d best give way to her.”
“She’ll damage her voice if this goes on,” he had to admit. “Can’t you talk sense to her?” and Mrs. Butter-worth, swinging back to her allegiance, promised she would try, but her talking was to ears that were deaf. Mary Ellen, appealed to in the name of gratitude she owed Walter, was stubbornly unmoved. “I was better off in the streets,” she said. “I sang. People heard me.”
Mrs. Butterworth held up her hands in scandalized protest. “Oh, dearie!” she said, incapable of more.
“Why am I kept down like this?” demanded Mary Ellen. “Mr. Pate knows best.”
“He knows he’s got me in prison. He thinks he can amuse himself by trying his experiments on me. His perfect system that has never been tried before! No, because nobody would stand it, so he picked me off the street to have me to try it on because he thought I was helpless. He doesn’t care about me. I’m not a girl. I’m not human flesh and blood. I’m a thing with a voice that he’s testing a system on, and he thinks I’ll let him go on testing till he’s tired of it. Years, he said. Years in a prison! Years, while he bribes me to stand it by making lying promises—”