Another need—to be like other people, to be just as good as anyone else—why not?—to have a bag like madam and hats like the hats you see on the street....
"That's all," she added.
It was all. When women sell themselves, it is not poverty necessarily that drives them to it. You don't know the hell of jealousy that burns in all of us. There are some women who make themselves beautiful less for the sake of pleasing men than for annoying other women.
"You must be unhappy."
"Yes, ma'am."
Is a poor little thing like Marie sensual? Women are rarely sensual. If they are, they have not been so from the start; they have become so.
Her Breton accent came back. "Madam," she said in her singsong of four years ago and in the same servile tone. Now she felt like relieving herself and telling me everything. There was one man who really didn't disgust her, but he was at the front, and if only he could come back! In the meantime she practiced economies and perhaps they could fix up a home and perhaps he would marry her. But if he did not come back, then—
I had been to blame, I alone. I had been satisfied to deplore her grim silence and do nothing. But I ought to have humiliated myself so as to earn her smile. I ought by talking to her to have driven out of her heart the longing to equal and surpass which prevents us all from being human sisters. I should have....
We are all to blame for the prostitutes, we are the ones at whom the stones should be cast. Nearly all of them are little Maries with the craving for just one man, the peaceful healthy desire for a secure hearth, but we tolerate poverty, and we don't know how to talk to each other.
She put her package under her arm. I did not know what to do. I went up to her, humble of heart, and rather awkwardly kissed her cheek streaked by tears and sullied by paint.