"I must have a day to think," I insisted, not because I hoped that anything would interfere between me and disaster, but I wanted to be able to throw it up to the Powers that I had given them an opportunity.
I knew what he was. I had always known. When he put his cheek against mine to kiss me I had felt the marks there of waste and looseness, just as I felt now that native trick he had for extenuation, for putting himself on the pathetic, the excusing side of things. But I did not shrink from him. I suppose it was because just then he was a symbol of the protection which I had so signally gone without. The need of trusting is stronger in women than experience. Nothing saved me but the persistent monitor of my art. Here, when all else was numbed by loneliness and hunger and unsuccess, it waked and warned me. I had not drawn back from Griffin nor the relation he proposed to me; but I couldn't stand for Flim-Flam. I think just at first, though, I made myself believe I was considering it.
I went out to see Pauline the next afternoon. Not that I expected anything from her. It was merely that she represented all that stood opposed to what I was being coerced into, and I meant to give it a chance.
"I am thinking of going with 'Flim-Flam'," I told her.
"Oh, but my dear—surely not with that!"
"I'll get eighteen dollars a week and my expenses."
"Well, of course, if you want to sell yourself just for a salary!" Pauline's attitude could not have been improved on if she had known all that the engagement implied, but it wasn't in her to be ungracious for long. "I suppose you'll get experience?"
"I'll get my board and clothes out of it," I told her bluntly. "And whether I like it or not, it is the only thing offered."
"And you are just taking it on trust? I suppose that is the right way; you can never tell how things will be brought about." I don't know how much of this was honest, and how much derived from the capacity for self-deception which grows on women whose sole business in life is getting on with a man. At any rate, having shaken my situation around to the shape of a moral attitude, as a robin does a worm, nothing would have prevented her from swallowing it whole.
Faint as I was I refused her invitation to dinner. With what I had in mind to do I didn't care to meet Henry Mills again. I was fiercer in my detestation of him and Cecelia than I had been before I had thought of being in the same case myself. I resented them as a ribald commentary on my necessity.