“Tush, tush, now. Be a good fellow, and if I like you I’ll take you on a long trip. You know you said you liked to travel, didn’t you? Well, I’m going to give you a chance, if you behave yourself and stick to me. I’ve been looking for a girl like you for a long while, and you just hit me right, so you’re on the job. I can make good, all right, you needn’t be afraid of that, for I’ve got all kinds of money, and when I meet anybody I like I spend it like a drunken sailor, see?”
“Yes, I see; I knew you had money all the time.”
“You did, did you; well, how?”
“Because it is only men with plenty of money who would talk to a girl the way you have been talking to me. It is only the men with money who think they can buy everything in sight, especially if that which they think they fancy happens to be the wearer of a skirt, and it’s the men with money who think their money is better than anybody else’s money, and their dollars are of more value than the dollars owned or controlled by some one who has less than they have. Are you married?”
“No,” he answered. He would have said more if he had known what to say.
“Then why don’t you go and pick out some woman whom you like and who likes you, and marry her and have it over with. Your time for being a gay sport has passed; leave that to the young fellows.”
Daintily she reddened his nails with rouge, doing them as carefully as if they were works of art, and tapping each one gently in order to get just the right amount of color.
“I don’t think,” she went on, “that you quite know what you’ve been up against. You may have heard the old saying, ‘a burnt child dreads the fire;’ well, I’m the child in this case, although I’m no child in years. As I told you before, I’ve been here a week, and it’s a great relief to me to be working, for I’ve been on one of those little trips you were just talking about, and there is nothing to it. You see,” then she glanced up quickly, “perhaps you don’t want to hear this.”
“That’s all right; go ahead, you can’t hurt my feelings.”
“I was told that I was a good fellow and a nice girl, and I was led to believe that I could have anything in the world that I wanted, and I want to tell you right here that it is a beautiful thing to believe and have faith in anyone. Some of the stories that men tell to women would make great reading if it was only written right, but they would be all fiction, because I don’t believe a man ever told a woman the truth in his life. I’m talking from personal experience, of course. This one man, who was really old enough to be my father, talked to me about my future, and said, among other things, he would always look after me, and I was serious enough about it to believe that he would, too. Then one day he asked me if I wanted to take a little trip, and his words were so much like yours when you spoke that you startled me. Isn’t it strange that the nails of your left hand take on so much higher polish than those of the right hand? I wonder why it is? There, I’m through now. Fifty cents, please.”