She had been on the stage once on a tour, but got a rough deal and quit.
He outclassed her by a hundred to one, and his source was as high as hers was low. There was no tinge of peasantry in his veins, but good successful American stock traceable back for five or six generations without a blot upon escutcheon—which, by the way, is rather rare in these days, consequently it’s worth boasting about. Lured into the maelstrom of music, he found himself at one of the tables with the girl beside him, still smiling.
Liquor has different effects on different men; it turns the mild man into a savage and makes a careful one reckless in the extreme. In this particular case caution went to the four winds and sympathy—which is apt to be dangerous at times—took its place. But let youth and inexperience excuse him.
“You haven’t told me your name,” he said. “What is it?”
“Brown,” she answered, “Jennie Brown.”
“I mean your right name.”
“Well, Jennie is my right name—I took the other one after I came out of the hospital. Some day, maybe, I’ll get married and then I’ll change it again, but not before.”
“What did you go to the hospital for—were you ill and did you have no one to take care of you?”
“Ill? You mean sick? No, I wasn’t sick; I was stabbed, and I got it good, too. I was cut from here to here,” and her right forefinger described across the front of her dress a line that went from her shoulder to the center of her breast bone. “At first I thought I was going to croak because I lost a lot of blood, but I’m pretty strong and I came out all right. You see, it was this way: A guy I knew got stuck on me and I couldn’t shake him, and he followed me around like a shadow. I didn’t like him because he wasn’t in my class, and besides he had another girl and I never took a girl’s fellow away in my life. If they split up then that’s different, but as long as they’re together I keep out of it. Every time I’d talk to anybody or go anywhere he’d be there. One night he followed me and a fellow I had that wanted to buy wine into Sharkey’s and when he tried to start a fight with my friend one of the waiters threw him out. Of course that made him sore, and he said that he’d get even. He did, all right, for one night as I was going upstairs he was in the top hall waiting for me, and the first thing I knew he had the knife into me.
“‘If you won’t have me, take this,’ he said, and then I felt an awful pain and when I put my hand up the blood was coming through my dress.