"No, no. I want it all. I must get hardened."
Back at the club, she hurried into her hot bath, with a vague hope of washing off all traces of that awful street. But their talk at dinner was desultory and rather serious. Jarvis talked for the most part, elaborating schemes of social reform and the handling of our immigrant brothers.
They started off to the theatre, with no definite plan. Bambi's spirits rose to the lights of Broadway, like a trout to a silver shiner. There is a hectic joyousness on Broadway, a personification of the "Eat, drink and be merry, for to-morrow we die" spirit which warms you, like champagne, or chills you, like the icy hand of despair, according to your mood. Bambi skipped along beside Jarvis, twittering gayly.
"People are happy, aren't they?"
"Surface veneer."
"Jarvis, you old bogie-man, hiding in the dark, to jump out and say 'Boo!' "
"That's my work—booing frauds. Let's go in here," he added.
" 'Damaged Goods,' " Bambi read on the theatre poster. "Do you know anything about it?"
"I've read it. It is not amusing," he added.
She followed him without replying. The theatre was packed with a motley audience of unrelated people. Professors and their wives, reformers, writers, mothers with adolescent sons, mothers with young daughters—what, in Broadway parlance, is called a "high-brow" audience—a striking group of people gathered together to mark a daring experiment of our audacious times; a surgical clinic on a social sore, up to this moment hidden, neglected, whispered about.