There are no peaceful lives cast in such a groove as that.
He began to grow a bit tired of her, even though the money did come to him regularly. You see, he had no occupation, and he had to do something with his time, and that something wasn’t good.
Then it was that the quarrels began, a few words at first, but gradually increasing in bitterness until one night he came in half drunk and taking her by the throat almost strangled her. She said afterward that she thought she was gone, because red lights danced before her eyes.
But she was game and didn’t whimper, not even when he struck her in the face with his clinched fist and threw her to the floor. She took her medicine gamely, for she realized intuitively that it was her medicine, and it was a part of the life she was leading.
The strange part of it all was that she never shed a tear.
Her neck hurt her, and when she looked in the mirror she saw the marks of his strong fingers and in that instant she was a changed woman. The flickering flame of her affection turned to a steady glow of hate and from that moment she began to figure on revenge. She stood still and white and cold, and every tick of the clock on the mantel was a stroke of doom for him. There was nothing melodramatic about her at this stage of the game, for her street training served to make her calm at times.
Woman-like, she at once took up with another champion and this time she picked out a man who was peculiarly fitted by force of circumstances to help her. He was to be not so much a companion as stepping-stone, and in that she simply followed out the natural instinct of the average woman who purrs and strikes indiscriminately and who makes merchandise and capital of her favors.
“He beat me,” she told this new one in talking of the one who had been supplanted, “and I want you to help me get even.”
The promise was made on this tainted honeymoon and for one hour every night they went out together looking for their prey in all of the places where he had been known to go.
For two weeks it was a fruitless search, and then the news came to her in an indirect way that he had been seen in the old haunts.