“Want the waiter?” broke in a hoarse voice like the croak of a mammoth raven.
“Give me a claret lemonade, Harry.”
“And what’ll the gent have?”
“A Martini cocktail.”
“Right you are.”
“As I was saying, if I only had a friend who would be on the level I’d be square with him, too. I ain’t got no pals, only Annie, and she’s been pretty good to me. Say, you ain’t married, are you?”
“No, not yet”; he laughed nervously as he said it. “I don’t believe in fellows getting married until they’re twenty-five, anyhow.”
“Neither do I.”
He noticed that her teeth were very white and even, and that her eyebrows and hair were jet black. The color on her cheeks had been put there with a skilled hand, and so deftly done that it passed for the real thing—in nature, not in art. Her hands were shapely, her nails manicured carefully and she had a trim figure. It was all stock in trade, but he wasn’t figuring it that way. Half a dozen of the kind of drinks they had given him had torn down the barrier, so far as he was concerned, that had been raised by society between it and the Scarlet Woman, and the pathos of her story had set him thinking and had roused all of his sympathies. She had played her part with all of the subtleness of the finished actress and had told her story with such simplicity and naivette that many an older man would have been deceived by the recital. She was working up to the climax as carefully and cautiously as the hunter works up into the wind after the unsuspecting deer, or the soft-footed cat ambushes the bird singing in the hedge. The emotional breed of her race helped to make her realistic, and her vivacity was contagious. Put her on the stage and she would be a success with proper training.
“If,” she laid her hand caressingly on the sleeve of his coat, “if I could find someone who would get my rings out and give me a chance I would be willing to do anything for him. I don’t like this life, always hustling, chased by the police and treated like a thief. But once in it’s hard to get out, for no one wants to give you a chance.”