"That cured me, I guess. I did stay a little longer, but I knew! I knew I was through. I stayed another week, and then I went to the mat.
"'Show me,' I said again. That was what I wanted, a show-down. And did they? Could they? Bah! They talked! They told me I was making wonderful progress.
"'Sure,' I admitted. 'I'm on my way. I see that.' But what I wanted 'em to slip me was a little info as to where was I going.
"Well, they talked. What did I hope for? What did I want? What did I expect to get out of it? And I told 'em. Well, that was a pretty large order for a girl of my station. My station didn't figure, I told 'em; we'd leave that out of it. And I told 'em so plainly that they neglected to refer to that any more.
"But they took another tack instead. The things that I'd mentioned were mere material things! Like that—scornful—as if they weren't worth mentioning at all. 'Merely material!' And there was a better world to live in—oh, my, yes—the world of the spirit.
"'Do you live in it?' I asked. 'Do you?' They wore sealskin coats, when it wasn't mink or chinchilla. They were driving downtown every day in their own closed cars to urge me to be content with the things of the spirit. And when I realized that—No, I wasn't sore. I was just hep, that's all.
"'I'll try Broadway,' I said then. 'If there's nothing, after all, in this climb-though-the-rocks-be-rugged stuff, no great harm done. I'm still young. But why waste more valuable time? I'll try Broadway,' I said. 'I'll have a whirl at the primrose path.'
"They didn't believe me at first. They thought I was just bluffing, just talking because I was discouraged. So they talked themselves some more—a whole lot more. Beautiful words—but they didn't mean anything. Not to me.
"Did any of 'em say: 'Sure, I understand. You're young and pretty, and it's natural you should crave such things. Here's my last year's coat and a perfectly miserable old last year's model car'? Did they? Don't make me laugh! Not that they woulda missed them. Nothing like that!
"And if they'd only come out flat in the beginning and admitted: 'Sure, it's a fight—we know that—a finish fight between women like you and women like us,' I could have liked 'em for it. If they'd said: 'We want these things, so do you, and only men can buy 'em—take 'em if you can,' that woulda been all right with me. But did they? You know the answer. They were telling me not to rough it, while they all the while, every chance they got, were hitting in the clinches! They were chirping to me, 'Oh, see how lovely the things of the spirit are,' while they were hanging with a death grip to everything material that they could get their hands on. I'd been honest with them—sincere. And with me they had been as hypocritical as hell!