"So that's my line. Cradle-snatching. Vamping the helpless infant!" She burst into a fit of angry, ugly laughter. "A good time! Running round with a poor kid with ten shillings a week pocket-money—eating in beastly cheap restaurants—riding on the tops of 'buses when some girls I know are feeding at the Ritz and rolling round in limousines. That's what I get for being soft. And now because I won't shoot myself, or go off to nowhere steerage, I'm a bad, abandoned woman. What d'you take me for?"
"What you are," he said.
She went dead white under her streaky paint.
"You—you've got no right to say that. You're a devil—a stuck-up devil—I hate you—I'd have always hated you if I'd bothered to mind. I—I gave him a good time. That's the truth. He was down and out when I met him, and I set him on his feet. I didn't mind what I missed—or the other girls guying me—I made him laugh and believe he had as good a chance in the world as anyone else. I put a bit of fun into him. I liked the kid. I—I like him now. If he wanted a good time to-morrow I'd run round with him again. But I'm no movie heroine—I'm not out for poison and funerals and slow music. Life's too damn serious for my sort to make a wail and a moan about it."
He stood close to her. He almost menaced her. He did in fact look dangerous enough with his white, set face and unflinching eyes in which stood two points of metallic light. If he had seen himself then he might have cowered away as from a ghost.
"I don't care a rap about you. I do care about my friend. You've got to stand by Cosgrave till he's over the worst."
"I won't—I won't!"
"I'll make you. You took him up. You made him think you cared about him. You're responsible——"
"I'm not—I won't be responsible; it's not my line. I've got myself to look after."
She had the look of someone struggling against an invisible entanglement—a pitiable, rather horrible look of naked purpose. She meant to cut free at whatever cost.