“You’re a little too fast—I can’t keep up with you,” she said. “Besides, I’m getting the willies standing here all the time. Be a good boy now, and let me go upstairs.”
“All right, girlie—game’s over,” he replied, gracefully taking his defeat. “How about next Saturday—eight ’r so?”
“That suits, I’ll be on deck,” she said.
He kissed her again and went out to the waiting taxicab. As she entered her room she had a droopy, misty feeling. Oh, well, another man turned down—what did she get out of it, anyway? It was funny, you wanted to and you didn’t want to at the same time. She blinked at herself in the mirror, and then turned out the light and went to sleep.
CHAPTER II
The late spring evening extracted lights from the twilight on Ninth Avenue, like some pacing conjurer producing tiny, molten rabbits from his trailing, unseen sleeves. Blanche walked along the street, on her way home from the cafeteria, and her high heels scuffed on the dirty cement sidewalk with a weary evenness. It was all right to say that sitting on a stool all day rested your legs, but the energy that went from your arms and head drew its penalty from all of your body. That cafeteria was finally “getting on her nerves”—the place had changed proprietors a few weeks before, and the new owner, a furtive-faced man of thirty, who considered himself to be an invincible Don Juan, always hovered about Blanche’s stand as much as he could and continually touched her in ways that made it hard for her to conceal her ire. She had run out of all of her tactfully laughing withdrawals, and momentary submissions when the gesture was not “too raw,” and the situation had reached a straining-point. It would not have been so bad if he had been good-looking, or if he had sought to lavish gifts upon her, but here he was a man with a long nose and a spindly body, making advances to her because she was an employee of his at twenty-three a week—the nerve of him! She would quit the place to-morrow if he tried another thing.
A year had passed since her last spring night with Campbell at The Golden Mill, and she was now a little over twenty-one. Her figure had grown less bottom-heavy, and her bosom had curved out a bit, and her face was more resolved and inquiring beneath the many ignorances that still remained. A deeper, half hopeless question had crept into her bluish-gray eyes—an untutored I’d-like-to-know-what-it’s-all-about look—and her wide lips had come together more closely and lost some of their loose thoughtlessness. Very dimly, she had even commenced to see flaws and credulities in her hitherto uninspected family, especially in her father and her brother Harry, whose endless strut and domineering words had become more of a palpable bluff to her. Yet, at the same time, she still accepted her environs without much anger or revolt, because, after all, they were real, and near-at-hand, and seemingly permanent, and because they still held nightly escapes, and laughing conquests at parties, and dance halls, and cabarets. The only one possibility of a change was marriage, and she dreaded this loophole because it meant being tied down to one man and losing the delicious sense of juggling several men to the stress of her whims. At times she toyed with the dream of becoming the mistress of a wealthy and at least endurable man—plenty of women “got away with it,” and what was hindering her?—but it never more than flitted through her mind because her life had always pounded into her the fact that a girl had to be “respectable” at all costs, had to cling to an indignant pose of keeping men at arm’s length, so that she could look the world in the face with the glad knowledge that it was unaware of her “personal” relentings and sins. Otherwise, the girl definitely cut herself off from all safeguards and reassurances, and was regarded with contemptuous smiles, and lightly spoken of. Again, Blanche had just insight enough to see what the outcome might be if she lived with such a man or allowed him to maintain an apartment for her—to see a hint of the querulous boredoms and the eventual separation that would ensue unless she was really “crazy” about the man. Of course, she merely translated it into the statement that she was not “cut out” for such a life.
During the past year, Campbell had been away twice on long vaudeville tours, and while he was in New York, her refusals to succumb to him had piqued him to a point where he called her up at much longer intervals. What the devil—he wasn’t so “hard up” that he had to chase after a cafeteria cashier who was probably merely intent on getting a “good time” out of him. He could not quite dismiss her from his mind—she had a proud twist to her which he liked in spite of himself, and his vanity always made him believe that he would eventually subdue her—and the impulse to see her again came back to him during his weariest moods—after an unusually pronounced jag, for instance, when he was “sore at the world” and when his head throbbed heavily, for at such times she always beckoned to him as a fresher and less solved feminine variation.
Blanche’s attitude toward him had narrowed down to a sentence which she had once said to herself: “’F he ever asks me to marry him, maybe I will, maybe, but he’s not going to get me like he does other girls, not ’f he was the Prince uh Wales himself!” During the past year she had been more steadily in the company of Rosenberg—he was a necessity to her because he “knew more” than the other men in her life and could assist the feeble stirrings and problems that were beginning to spring up in her mind. He was still unattractive to her in a physical way—a very bright, good boy, but not the broad-chested, wise and yet tender man who constituted her hazy ideal—but she had permitted him embraces of greater intimacy, out of the feeling that it wasn’t right to take so much from him and give him nothing in return, although she refrained from any semblance of a full surrender. He frequently loaned her books, through which she stumbled with amusement and awe—she could not understand most of what they said (it sure was “bughouse”), but when he sought to explain it to her it grew a bit clearer, and she had glimpses of men and women in the novels, who lived more freely and searchingly than she did, and who saw and spoke of “all sorts of strange things” that she had never dreamt of—com-plex-es, and inhibishuns, and hunting for bee-oo-ty, and boldly telling life how double-faced it was, and living your own life with a laugh at the objections of other people, and always looking for something that stood behind something else. They formed themselves into perplexing lures that could never be quite banished from her mind, and became “stronger” when she was in her “bluest” moods.
Rosenberg had found another girl—a blonde, slim chatterer, who tried to write poetry between her labors as a stenographer, and worshiped his “won-der-ful brain,” but although this girl had become his mistress, he never regarded her with more than a flattered satisfaction and still saw Blanche once a week. He could not rid himself of the hope that Blanche might finally love him and marry him, and the other girl’s glib professions of culture and creative aspiration were never as appealing as Blanche’s stumbling and honest questions. He saw “something big” in Blanche and wanted to extract it from her and bask in its warm emancipations.