“It had better not be very long,” said she, and suddenly her high voice pitched to tragedy. “If—if—I can't get another place that's decent for a girl to take,” said she, “and if I don't get what's owing me before long, I shall either have to take one of them places or get a dose.” She said the last word with an indescribably hideous significance. Her blue eyes seemed to blaze at Carroll.
Then the other girl pressed closer. “You needn't talk that way,” said she to the girl. “You know that I—”
“I ain't goin' to live on you,” returned the other girl, violently. People were beginning to look at the group.
“Now, you know, May,” said the other girl, “my room is plenty big enough for two, and I'm earning plenty to give you a bite till you get a place yourself, and you know you may get that place you went to see about yesterday.”
“No, I won't,” said May. “It seems to me it's pretty hard lines that a poor girl can't get the money she's worked as hard for as I have.”
The other girl pushed herself in front of May and spoke to Carroll, and there was something womanly and beautiful in her face. “I have a real good place,” she said, in a low voice, and she enunciated like a lady. “A real good place, and I'll look out for May till she gets one, and I can wait until you are able to pay me.”
“I will pay you all as soon as possible. I give you all my word I will pay you in the end,” said Carroll.
He seemed to see the three go out in a sort of dream. It did not really seem to him that it was he, Arthur Carroll, who was sitting there in that smoking, greasy atmosphere, before that table covered with a stained cloth, over which the waiter had ostentatiously spread a damp napkin, with that bowl of canned tomato-soup before him, and that thick cup of coffee, with those three unhappy young creditors, who had reviled and, worse than reviled, pitied him, passing out, with the open glances of amused curiosity fastened upon him on every side.
“Guess that dude is down on his luck,” he heard a young man at his left say.
“Guess he put the money he'd ought to have paid that young lady with into his overcoat,” his companion, a girl with a picture-hat, and a wide lace collar over her coat, responded.