"Nance," he whispered, "you wonderful girl, if I didn't know about that little thief up at the Bronsonia I'd—I'd marry you alive, just for the fun of piling pretty things on you."
"The deuce you would!" I sailed past him, with Topham and my Lord in my wake.
They didn't leave me till they'd stripped me clean. I felt like a Christmas tree the day after. But, somehow, I didn't care.
VIII.
Is that you, Mag? Well, it's about time you came home to look after me. Fine chaperon you make, Miss Monahan! Why, didn't I tell you the very day we took this flat what a chaperon was, and that you'd have to be mine? Imagine Nancy Olden without a chaperon—Shocking!
No, 'tisn't late. Sit down, Maggie, there, and let me get the stool and talk to you. Think of us two—Cruelty girls, both of us—two mangy kittens deserted by the old cats in a city's alleys, and left mewing with cold and hunger and dirt, out in the wet—think of us two in our own flat, Mag!
I say, it makes me proud of us! There are times when I look at every stick of furniture we own, and I try to pretend to it all that I'm used to a decent roof over my head, and a dining-room, kitchen, parlor, bedroom and bath. Oh, and I forgot the telephone the other tenant left here till its lease is up. But at other times I stand here in the middle of it and cry out to it, in my heart:
"Look at me, Nancy Olden, a householder, a rent-payer, the head of the family, even if it's only a family of two and the other one Mag! Look at me, with my name in the directory, a-paying milk bills and meat bills and bread bills! Look at me with a place of my own, where nobody's right's greater than my own; where no one has a right but me and Mag; a place where—where there's nothing to hide from the police!"
There's the rub, Mag, as Hamlet says—(I went to see it the other night, so that I could take off the Ophelia—she used to be a good mimic herself, before she tried to be a leading lady.) It spoils you, this sense of safeness that goes with the honesty graft. You lose the quickness of the hunter and the nerve of the hunted. And—worse—you lose your taste for the old risky life. You grow proud and fat, and you love every stick in the dear, quiet little place that's your home—your own home. You love it so that you'd be ashamed to sneak round where it could see you—you who'd always walked upright before it with the step of the mistress; with nothing in the world to be ashamed of; nothing to prevent your staring each honest dish-pan in the face!