“How about me, Harry, you know I’m always with you,” Philip said.
“Oh, you’re all right, but you need more guts,” Harry answered. “You don’t know enough to go out an’ get what’s comin’ to you.”
“’F I was a scrapper like you, maybe I would,” said Philip. “I don’t take any sass from anybody ’f I can help it, you know that, Harry.”
“It’s not right f’r you an’ Blanche to be always fightin’ like this,” said Mrs. Palmer, turning to Harry. “It’s I that wish you’d be nice to each other, like a brother an’ sister should. I don’t think you done right, I don’t, but it’s no good pitchin’ into you now. Maybe you’ll be a good, honest boy from now on, maybe you will.”
“You mean well, ma, but you don’t know what I’m up against,” Harry answered, as he patted her head in a clumsy, reluctant way.
“You make me sick, Kate,” the father broke in. “Didn’t you an’ me work hard f’r years, didn’t we, an’ what did we get out of it, what did we get? Nothin’ but trouble, I’ll say! You an’ Blanche leave Harry alone, ’r you’ll hear from me. He got a bum deal this time, but he’ll be out on top, ’fore it’s over.”
“Yeh, I’ve got confidence in Harry,” said Philip, giving his brother a look of respect tempered with more secret annoyance. “He knows how to handle himself.”
“Well, I don’t want my own boy to get behind the bars, an’ he will ’f he don’t behave himself more,” Mrs. Palmer said, in a weakly lamenting voice, as she shuffled back to the kitchen.
Blanche, who had no engagement for the night, went to a neighboring moving-picture show and saw a film called “Nell of the Yukon,” in which a dimpled statuesque actress named Dorothy Darling—a lady in her desperately preserved, early thirties—smiled, and frowned, and struggled, without subtlety but with much animal abandonment wasted on the impossible tale. She played the part of a speckled but not quite approachable dance-hall girl in a mining camp in Alaska, and she was in love with a handsome young gambler who had incurred the enmity of the saloon and dance-hall proprietor. Of course, the gambler was the only honest one in the place, and, of course, he protected her from the proprietor, whose intentions toward her were, alas, horribly immoral, and, of course, the gambler was also loved by another jealous dance-hall girl, who became the tool of the unscrupulous proprietor. The second girl trapped the gambler in her room and, after he had gently repulsed her pleadings, delivered him to the ambuscade of the villainous proprietor and his cohorts. He was about to be slain by this oddly hesitant and delaying villain when Nell of the Yukon rescued him, at the head of a band of his mining-camp friends.
As Blanche looked on at the film, she had an excited interest that sometimes lessened to a sense of the absurd. It was “sort uh silly,” to be sure, especially that scene where Nell fought against the proprietor, in her room, and suffered no casualties except the tearing of the upper part of her waist, and the loosening of her hair. No girl ever got off that easy when a strapping fellow had her cornered and was out to do her wrong! But still, the story was a glimpse into another fabricated world, far more enticing than her own, and in her eagerness to forget the immediate facts in her life, Blanche devoured the colossal unreality of the film with only an occasional qualm. Afterwards, as she walked down Ninth Avenue, she had an odd mood—too tired to be discontented, and yet carrying the suggestion that life was purposeless and that there was “nothing much to it.” The mood stayed with her as she rested prone on the bed in her little room.