One night, after the show, she went with a party on a slumming tour through Chinatown. They were out to have a good time and nothing more.
In one of the resorts in which they stopped was a good-looking young bartender who caught her fancy. He was all right in a way, but she outclassed him about twenty to one, but there is no telling what a woman is going to do, or upon whom she is going to bestow her favors, any more than one can tell what the state of the weather will be a month or two months from now.
She thought she was in love with him—but she wasn’t. She had only taken a fancy to him, which was a different sort of a proposition, but she didn’t know it at that time.
She went on singing just the same, but the time she was out of the theatre she spent with him, and the more money she earned the better he dressed.
She dipped a little deeper into the different vices, until at last she went up against the king of them all—opium.
With all of her drinking and cigarette smoking she was still able to hold her own and keep her voice in some kind of shape, and many a rare old song has she trilled in some cheap dive, and made the old-timers straighten up in their seats and tell her she was all right. Previous to that she had figured in only one escapade and that was when she was caught in a raid at a masked ball which was so off-color and made up of many desperate characters—men and women—that it took a platoon of police with drawn clubs to bring the affair to a sudden end.
They will never forget the night when she went down to the “Drum” in James street, and after setting up the drinks for the crowd, stood in the centre of the grimy floor and without a note of accompanying music sang Annie Laurie.
At the end of the first verse, a drunk crept on his hands and knees from a dark corner where he had been lying, and staggering to his feet, looked at her dully with bloodshot eyes, and then cursed her so violently that she instinctively shrank back for a moment.
But she had been drinking, too, and was equal to the emergency.
“Shut up,” she retorted. “I’m going to sing the whole damned song or break a rib trying,” and with that she started on the second verse.