“I’ll say I have,” answered Blanche.
For the next week Blanche hung around the apartment, and enjoyed the luxury of rising at ten in the morning and losing the old feeling of drowsy, meek bondage, and went to moving-picture theaters or read some of Rosenberg’s books during the afternoon, and romped about with men every other night, but at the end of the week, the relish in her freedom disappeared, and a nervous weariness took its place. She wanted to be doing something again, and to feel that she was earning the right to her nightly pleasures, and to rid herself of the sense that she “didn’t amount to anything” and was just hugging her bed to forget about it. To be sure, work was disagreeable and often exhausting, but if you had no other gifts, what else could you do? That phrase that Rosenberg was always using—“expressing yourself”—it kind of got under your skin. Why couldn’t she write things, or be an actress, or learn something and teach it to other people, like the men and women whom she read of in the borrowed novels? Well, maybe she would some day, if she ever found out just how to go about it. She was still a mere girl and she didn’t intend to be kept down forever. In the meantime, working could prevent her from getting “too blue” about everything—a brisk distraction which was the only one within her reach.
She secured a position in a beauty parlor, giving “waves” to the hair of young women fidgeting over their allurements, and passé women rescuing the vanished or vanishing charm, and on the evening of her first working day she met Rosenberg at their usual street-corner rendezvous.
“Let’s just have a talk and not go anywheres to-night,” she said, as they walked down the glittering hardness of Forty-second Street.
“I’m with you,” he answered, with an elation upon his narrow face.
When a girl didn’t want you to spend anything on her, and yet desired to be with you, it was an exquisitely promising sign, and perhaps Blanche had begun to fall in love with him. They sat on one of the stone benches in front of the Public Library building and beneath one of the huge carved lions that guard its portals, and they looked out at Fifth Avenue, with its endless stream of crawling, shiny, smoothly soulless automobiles and busses.
“Look at all those machines, going somewhere and nowhere at the same time,” he said, dreamily. “Don’t they all look important though, all rolling along in two directions, and still they’re just filled with all kinds of people hunting for an evening’s fun, that’s all.”
“S’pose they are, what of it?” she asked. “You’ve got to get some amusement outa life, haven’t you?”
“Oh, if that’s all you’re after then you’re just like an animal,” he answered, importantly. “D’you know, sometimes I wonder why people have heads—they hardly ever use them.”
“Well, I don’t know—I’ve been using my head some lately but I don’t seem to be getting anywheres,” she said, dully.