"Then?" Armitage queried.
"That's why I came home," Sophie said. "I was so sick with the shock and shame of it all ... so sick and ashamed I couldn't sing any more. I wouldn't. My voice died.... I deserved what happened. I'd been playing for it ... taking the wine, the music, Adler's love-making ... and expecting to escape the taint of it all.... Afterwards I saw where I was going ... what that life was making of me...."
"I don't know how you came to have anything to do with such a rotten lot," Armitage cried, sweating under a white heat of rage.
"Oh, they're just people of means and leisure who like to patronise successful young dancers and singers for their own amusement," Sophie said.
"Because you fell in with a set of ultraæsthetics and degenerates, is no reason to suppose all our people of means and leisure are like them," Armitage declared hotly.
"I don't," Sophie said; "what I felt, when I began to think about it, was that they were just the natural consequences of all the easy, luxurious living I'd seen—the extreme of the pole if you like. I saw the other when I went to live in a slum settlement in Chicago."
"You did?" Armitage exclaimed incredulously.
"When I got over the shock of—my awakening," she went on slowly, "I began to remember things Michael had said. That's why I went to Chicago ... and worked in a clothing factory for a while.... I saw there why Adler's a millionaire, and heard from girls in a Youille-Bailey-M'Gill factory why Connie Youille-Bailey has money to burn...."
"Old Youille-Bailey had fingers in a dozen pies, and he left her all he'd got," Armitage said.
"But people down in the district where most of their money is made are living like bugs under a rotten log," Sophie exclaimed wearily. "They're made to live like that ... in order that people like William P. Adler and Mrs. Youille-Bailey ... may live as they do."