“Aw, don’t take on so, Kate,” her husband answered. “Mabel’s not like Blanche anyway—she don’t put on the dog an’ tell her folks they don’t know nothin’. She jus’ wants to have a good time an’ land a good man f’r herself, and she’ll get over this mess all right. She made a mistake in the crowd she went with—they prob’bly told her they was rich business men.”
“I suppose I’ll have to get arrested before any of you’ll think I know something,” Blanche broke in, disgustedly. “I’m sorry Mabel got into this fix, but if you try to play men for their money, you’ve got to expect that they’ll turn the tables on you, the first chance they get.”
“G’wan, you’re jes’ jealous uh her,” Harry said. “You’d do the same thing ’f you had nerve enough.”
“Now, now, this is no time f’r scrappin’,” his father interposed. “We’ve got to hustle around to O’Brien an’ see what he c’n do f’r us.”
The two Palmers departed, and Blanche and Philip tried to soothe the mother, who had begun to weep and rock in her chair. Blanche felt a dab of malice toward her sister—Mabel was so dreamless, and never tried to understand Blanche’s hopes and desires, and was always scoffing and sneering—but it was swallowed up by a sense of enforced compassion. Perhaps Mabel was just a misguided girl whose head had been turned by the flatteries of men, and perhaps she would wake up now and begin to think, and question herself and her life, to a small degree at any rate. In addition, Blanche was relieved at this turn in events, since it might distract the attention of her family and make them drop for a time their insistence upon marriage, and their naggings about Campbell, and their jeers at the books that she read. She went to bed early that night, and reclined awake for a long time, spinning her hopes from the dark texture of the room. After all, why did she waste so much time in arguing with her family? They would never understand her in a million years, and they meant well in spite of all of their meanness, but she had simply passed beyond them. They wanted her to be like them, and share their ideas of happiness and propriety, and they used cruel methods and threats without knowing how cruel they were because they felt that the end could apologize for the means. It was all inevitable, and the best thing that she could do would be quietly to pack her belongings some day and move out to some rooming-house uptown before they knew what was happening. Then let them rave all they wanted—what could they do?
Besides, her leaving would convince them that she “meant business,” and most of their bullying was probably due to the fact that they still thought that they could force her to obey them. When she was finally living in a place of her own, she’d go to some art or dramatic school at night—maybe she could learn to draw after all, since she had been very clever with sketches when she was a child at school, and still poked around with a pencil now and then. Or again, why couldn’t she be able to act on the stage, if she were only taught how to handle her voice and her limbs. These famous actresses, they hadn’t been perfect and accomplished in their cradles, and if she studied English and learned how to speak more correctly, she might have as good a chance as they had had. Nothing ever came to you unless you had a desperate faith in yourself. She would have to work long and hard at these things, she knew that, but she worked hard every day as it was, without deriving any satisfaction from it.
An image of Rosenberg slipped back to her. Poor boy, wonder what he was doing now? She owed a great deal to him, and the only payment that she had given had been to jilt him. Was it always as one-sided as this between men and women—always a kind of slave-and-master affair, with one person taking everything and the other person hanging on because he couldn’t think of any one else and was grateful for the scraps that were thrown to him? She hadn’t meant to hurt this boy—he had wanted feelings that were impossible to her, and her body had often endured his hands out of pity, and her only reason for guilt was that she had kept on seeing him. But she had needed, oh, she had needed all of the spurrings-on, and answers, and thoughts, and beliefs in her, which he had poured out—yes, it had been selfishness on her part, but she was beginning to think that people could never avoid being selfish to each other in some respect, even though they hid it behind all kinds of other names and assertions. They could make it aboveboard, though, by confessing the unevenness of their relations, and by not demanding anything that each person was not compelled to give of his own accord. The ideal, of course, would be a man and a woman who selfishly craved all of each other, for deeply permanent reasons, in which case each one would become a happy plunderer—did such a thing ever quite come off?... Her thoughts trailed out into sleep.
On the next morning at the Beauty Parlor, Blanche was distracted, and a little uneasy about her sister—after all, the poor kid was just conceited and flighty, with no real harm in her—and when Philip came in at noon and told her that Mabel had been released, for lack of evidence, Blanche was glad that the matter had blown over. When Blanche returned from her work that night, Mabel was seated in the one armchair in the apartment, with the rest of the family grouped admiringly around her. Now that it was all over, they regarded her as something of a heroine—one who had tussled with their never-recognized but potent enemy, the law, and emerged scot-free—and although they qualified this attitude with warnings and chidings, it dominated them, nevertheless. The mother remained an exception—she hoped that her daughter would act more soberly now, and leave her nightly dissipations, and mingle with more honest men.
“Gee, I’m glad you’re out,” Blanche said, after kissing her sister. “Did they treat you rough after they arrested you?”
“They wasn’t so bad,” Mabel answered. “They put me through a coupla third degrees, first when they brought me in, and then another one ’bout nine in the ev’ning, tryin’ to trip me up, y’know. They said they knew I was a prostitute, jes’ to get my goat, and I started to cry and said it was a darn lie—I jes’ couldn’t help it.”