“Let’s not and say we did,” he answered, moodily.
“Gee, I never saw a fellow like you,” she replied. “Dance, dance, that’s all you care about. Here I know you’re short on money, and here I’m giving you a chance to get away with forty cents for the night—four thin dimes—and you turn it down.”
“Don’t always rub in how poor I am,” he said, nettled. “’F I was so darn crazy about money, like other guys are, I’d get it all right. There’s other things I’m interested in—books, and good plays, and watching what other people do. They all call me lazy at home, but it don’t bother me any. I don’t see that they get so much out of life by working their heads off all the time.”
Blanche felt a little scornful and a little inquiring as she listened to him. Who ever heard of saying that people shouldn’t work—what would become of them if they didn’t? Besides, what did he get out of all his reading and this “think-ing” of his? He was a boob in many respects, and in a way she was wasting her time with him. She could have been in the company of men who could show her an actual good time—high-class cabarets and automobile parties, and the best theaters and restaurants. Yet, after she went out with these men for a while she always grew tired of them. They all got down to what they wanted from her, and it became a bald question of taking or rejecting them—you couldn’t “string them along” forever—and they all lacked something that she was unable to put her finger on—something “classy” and aboveboard and decent without being goody-goodish. When she “let them go too far,” under the hilarious urge of liquor, she never felt quite right about it afterwards. She could never rid herself of the feeling that the man had not deserved what he had received and that she had been just another girl on his list. Rosenberg was the one man who came nearest to fulfilling this mysterious lack, but he was deficient in all of the other requisites, and his physical appeal was weak to her.
“Well, you don’t read a book when you dance, do you?” she asked at last, desiring to take a mild jab at him. “Gee, but you’re the cat’s something. I wish you had more get-up about you.”
“Yeh, it’s too bad I haven’t got a roll,” he answered. “Sometimes I b’lieve that’s all you girls think about.”
An anger mounted within her.
“Say, ’f I did, why’d I have to pick you out?” she asked. “You make me sick and tired!”
“Aw, don’t get so sore,” he replied. “I’m touchy in one spot, that’s all. Let’s talk about something else. I was reading a book called First Street the other day—it’s highbrow, you know, but it’s darn popular, too. I hear they’ve sold a hundred thousand. It tells all about how gossipy-like and narrow-minded and, oh, just small, people are—the people that live in those little burgs.... Say, the more I find out about this world of ours the less I like it. Why the devil can’t people leave each other alone, and do what they want, long’s they’re not hurting anybody.”
His last words made Blanche sympathize with him, in spite of the fact that, to her, there was an unmanly element in what he said. Real men, now, went out and fought with each other, and “stood the gaff” and “got what was coming to them” and made people obey them. Still there was too darn much bossing in the world, with ev’rybody sticking his finger in the other person’s pie. Her family was always nagging at her, and the owner of the cafeteria was always telling her what to do—thought he owned her for his measly twenty-two a week—and the cop on the corner gave you a rotten look if he saw you walking alone late at night ... yes, too darn much bossing to suit her.