"But you found out that it all came right in the end, didn't you? That it was best just for you to trust ... you used to be bitter about it ... but trusting is always best."
"Oh, if you think I've been trusting all these years ... I've been working."
"Of course, of course." Much of her old manner came back with the occasion for moralizing. "But you were too amusing, you were quite fierce with Henry because he wouldn't do anything about it." She laughed reminiscently. "And now, you see...." Her look travelled about the rose-coloured room, full of the evidence of prosperity.
"Pauline," I said, "if you are thinking that I could have gone to New York and become the success I am, without the help that you and Henry might have given me, you are making a great mistake. What did happen was that I had to accept it from a quarter where it wasn't so much to be expected, and was not nearly so agreeable."
"That man Mark Eversley found for you, you mean. Well, I suppose you did get on better for a little start."
"Start!" I cried. "Start! I had to have everything—food and clothes." A sudden recollection flashed upon me of those first days in New York, of myself become merely a dummy on which to hang a fat little Jew's notions of acceptable contours; the offence of it; the greater offence from which by the opportune appearance of the Jew I had so hardly escaped.
"Have you any idea, Pauline, what it means to have a man invest money in you?... a man like Polatkin. I was his property, a horse he had entered for the race. He had a stake on me...."
Pauline looked aghast; vague recollections of the actress heroines of fiction shaped her thought.
"You don't mean to say, Olivia, that you—that you were——"
"His mistress," I finished for her bluntly. "Is that the only thing your imagination takes offence at? Isn't it enough for me to tell you that he orders my corsets for me?" That did reach her. I could see her struggle with the habitual effort to put the unwelcome fact down, anywhere out of sight and knowledge, under the cotton wool of a moral sentiment. Even now if she could escape being implicated in my predicament by avoiding the knowledge of it, she would not only do that but convict herself of superiority as well. My gorge rose against it.