"Only a few minutes, pa," the girl returned quietly.
"Well—what're you standing there—staring!—for, anyhow?"
"I didn't mean anything: I was just taking off my hat."
"Well"—his face was now purple with senseless anger—"cut along! Don't bother me. I'm busy."
"I see."
There was a damnable superciliousness in the tone of the girl as she turned away. Thursby meditated an explosion, but refrained at discretion: Joan had taught him that, unlike her browbeaten mother and timid sister and her sleek, loaferish brother, she could give as good as he could send. He bent again, grumbling, over his dope. Instantly it gripped him, obliterating all else in his cosmos. He frowned, moistened the pencil at his mouth, and scrawled another note in the greasy little book.
Joan slipped quietly away to her bedroom. She found it stifling; ventilated solely from the parlour and the open door to Butch's kennel, it reeked with the smell of human flesh and cheap perfume. She noted resentfully the fact that her sister had neglected to make up the bed: its rumpled sheets and pillows, still retaining the impression of over-night, lent the cubicle the final effect of sordid poverty.
Hanging up her hat and coat, she sat for a time on the edge of the bed, thinking profoundly.
Such an existence, she felt, passed human endurance. And a gate of escape stood ajar to her, with a mundane paradise beyond, if only she had the courage to adventure....
In any event, conditions as they were now with the Thursbys could not obtain much longer. If the Old Man continued to follow the races through the poolrooms, he would soon be forced out of his small business and his family dispossessed of their mean lodgings; and there was no longer any excuse for hope that he would ever shake off the bondage of his infatuation. As it was, he gave little enough toward the support of his family, and grudged that little; almost all his meagre profits went to the poolrooms; it was only when he won (or seldom otherwise) that he would spare his wife a few dollars. Furthermore, his business was heavily involved in an intricate meshing of debt.