When the light of morning touches the buildings and pavements of a city, it always seems to borrow their hardness and to lose in some degree its quality of flowing detachment. The Sunday morning that fell upon Ninth Avenue, New York City, gave you a sense of invisible stiffness in its very air. The buildings, with their smudged, flat fronts and tops, presented the impression of huge warehouses stretching down both sides of the street—the appearance of holding commodities rather than human beings. Most of them were five or six stories in height, and their curtained, oblong windows and the bright, tawdry shops at their base had an oddly lifeless aspect, in spite of the sounds and animations which occurred within and around them. The iron elevated-railroad structure that extended down the street, with all of its roar and rush of trains, could not destroy the spirit of silent inertia that lurked within the scene.
Blanche Palmer stood in front of a bureau, in one of the apartments that lined the street, and combed her dark red, bobbed hair, as though it were a sacred and perilous performance. She was only partially dressed, and the mild light that came in through a rear window from the courtyard brought an extra vividness to her semiplump arms, abruptly rounded shoulders and moderately swelling bosom. Their freshness stood out, a little forlorn and challenging, in the disordered room with its half drab and half gaudy arrangements. The brass bed, the magazine-posters of pretty women against the pink-flowered wallpaper, the red plush chair with the most infinitely smug of shapes, the white chintz, half-dirty curtain and dark green shade at the window—all of them seemed to be meanly contending against the youth and life of her body.
She was fairly tall, with most of the weight of her body centered below her waist and with an incongruously small torso, but this effect was not as clumsy as it might have been, since it was relieved by a bold approach to symmetry. Something of a child and an amazon met in her body. Her face was not pretty if you examined each of its features separately—the overwide lips, the nose tilting out too suddenly at the tip, and the overstraight, shaved eyebrows—but the whole of it had a piquant and enticing irregularity, and it was redeemed by her large, deeply set, bluish-gray eyes and the fine smoothness of her cream-white skin.
Her twenty years of life had given her a self-consciousness, and a hasty worldly wisdom, and a slightly complacent sexual alertness, and these three qualities blended into the customary expressions on her face. Yet at odd moments it showed questioning and dissatisfied shades. She was just a little more frank and wondering than the other girls in her environment—just a little distressed and seeking beneath all of the affected wrigglings, and ignorances, and small, cruel impulses that ruled her heart and mind. As she stood before the bureau, the treble of a child’s voice emerged from the babble of sounds in the surrounding apartments, lifting the words: “Well, it ain’t gonna rain no mo-ore, it ain’t gonna rain no mo-ore; how in the heck can I wash my neck when it ain’t gonna rain no mo-ore.” Blanche took up the song, half humming it as she slipped on an old, black, sleeveless evening gown which she still kept to wear about the apartment when visitors were not present or expected. It had a big, scarlet satine flower sewed at the side of the waist and was extremely low-necked and gave her a near-courtesan touch, increased by the over-thick rouge and lipstick on her face. She could not dispense with cosmetics, even before her family, because they were too inherently a part of the shaky sexual pride within her, which always needed to be glossed and protected because it had been frequently hurt and discountenanced in competitions and comparisons with the other girls in her life.
She stepped down the dark hallway and entered the living-room, where her family sat and pored over the Sunday papers. The hour was verging on noon, and the debris and confusion of a past breakfast stood on the square, uncovered table in the middle of the room. Blanche eyed it peevishly.
“Oh, for Gawd’s sake, what a dump,” she said. “How’m I going to sit down with gue and coffee all over the chairs?”
“Too bad about you,” her brother, Harry, answered, with an amiable jeer in his voice. “Too bad. We’ll move up on the Drive an’ get a lotta servunts for you, huh?”
“Sure, go ahead, but as long’s we’re not there yet you c’n move your big legs and help clean off the table,” she replied.
“Whatsamatter, you parulyzed?” he asked, still genial as he rose and picked up some of the dishes.
Her sister Mabel and her oldest brother, Philip, joined in the slangy, waggish repartee as Blanche went to the kitchen and came back with a cup of coffee and a fried egg. The father chortled behind the comic-section of one of the papers, oblivious to this usual Sunday morning “kidding-match,” and the mother was busy in the kitchen. Harry Palmer, known to the bantam-class of the prize-fighting ring as Battling Murphy, was a youth of twenty-two, with a short body whose shoulders and chest were full, hard lumps, and whose legs were thinly crooked but steel-like. His small, black eyes had a dully fixed, suspicious, partly dumb and partly cunning look that never left them, even in the midst of his greatest smiles and laughters, and his nose was shaped like the beginning of a corkscrew, and his thick lips just touched each other, with the lower one slightly protruding. His moist black hair was brushed backward; his skin was a dark brown with a dab of red running through it. The start of a primitive man, forced to become tricky and indirect as it escaped from the traps and ways of city streets, but still longing for direct blows and curses, showed on every inch of him. He was cruel without wit enough to know that he was cruel, and in his most lenient and joking moments the little imagination and sentiment that he had grew large in its own estimation and made him feel that he was as decent and kind as he could be in a life where you had to “put it over” the other fellow, or go under.