“Well, you frame up some kind of an act, then come around and see me, and I may be able to get you a trial somewhere.”
And then twenty-three.
Many a good fighter has quit when he found every rush he made was stopped with a tantalizing jab in the nose, and many a man has thrown up the sponge when he has walked the streets day in and day out and discovered that nobody wanted him.
At the end of a week The Girl would have written a letter home or taken a train back if it had not been for her pride. She didn’t want to acknowledge defeat, but she was on the verge of it.
She was coming out of a theatre one night when she met The Man.
There must be a man else there would be no story. He was about forty-five years old, had been through enough campaigns to give him self-possession, and he had been successful enough to be egotistic. Two minutes later they were walking down Broadway together, and she was rather glad that she had found someone who took an interest in her. One-half hour after that and they were seated at a table in a big restaurant; the order had been given and she was telling him all about herself while he was looking her over with an exceedingly critical eye and making up his mind that she showed up rather good under a strong light, especially when she smiled.
A broiled lobster, a quart of claret, then a couple of birds and a quart of wine are enough to change the ideas and opinions of a lot of people, especially if such a bill of fare is unusual, and so it happened that when the red began to come to The Girl’s cheeks, the things The Man were saying to her didn’t seem so much out of the way after all. Besides, that hall bedroom in the musty old boarding house was rapidly becoming a nightmare. Between you and me, if she had never smiled this thing would never have happened.
The Man lighted a cigar, and as he blew the first puff of blue smoke toward the ceiling he observed:
“My dear, marriage is nothing more nor less than a useless and barbaric rite, and when it is all summed up it amounts to nothing in the end. Why should you be legally bound to any man in this world? It would be all right as long as you loved him, then you wouldn’t care, but suppose your feelings changed, what then? In order to get a divorce from him you would have to catch him committing a crime for which the law would grant you a divorce, or get good evidence, which amounts to the same thing. You might separate from him if he was cruel to you or didn’t support you, but suppose he was kind and gave you all the money you wanted, then you would still have to live with him as his wife. Now, on the other hand, if you were not married to him, you would have a perfect right, as soon as your feelings changed, to leave him without a moment’s notice. You would be under no obligations to him under any circumstances, and he, knowing that you were free to go and come as you pleased, would, in order to keep you, treat you with greater consideration than if you were his wife. You can believe me or not, just as you wish, but an understanding between a man and a woman is all that is necessary to happiness in this world. Don’t be old-fashioned, but let us make an agreement of some kind between ourselves. You will be perfectly independent, free to go and come as you like, and do as you wish.”
There was a certain amount of logic in this argument, especially when the reverse of the picture is a cheap room in a cheap boarding house. So the end of the first chapter was that the landlady wondered why her lodger never came back, even to get her case and the few belongings it contained. It was all mysterious to her, but as she was paid in advance, she said nothing, and at the end of the week rented the room to an old fellow with asthma who was living on an allowance.