The seven dollars and fifty cents I felt would be a godsend at this time. I would be able to pay the boarding-house woman. She had stopped me on the street only that morning and said:
“If you don’t pay me, Miss Ascough, you will have no good luck.”
Then there was Miss Darling. I must keep my word to her. Moreover, Ada had been writing me urgent letters insisting that I should send something home, for Wallace, Ellen’s husband, was very ill, and, of course, no help was coming from them now. As I looked at Miss St. Denis, I thought to myself that after all it could not be such dreadful work, or she would not do it. She seemed to me the embodiment of sweetness and refinement, and I could not imagine her doing anything that was gross or impure. I remembered that even the time I saw her posing nude before the class, I had not felt revolted in the way I had that time when Lil Markey had skipped about the Count’s studio. The amateur model, Lil, had been simply brazen. The professional one was seriously doing her honest duty. There were many other girls in Boston I had met who were doing the same work, and most of them were good girls. Mr. Sands had said that modesty and virtue did not always go hand in hand, and that it was his experience that some of the most immoral women appeared to be the most modest and shy.
Miss St. Denis was lying back again among her pillows, with her white hands—the hands Mr. Sands had said were the most beautiful in America—clasped at the back of her head. She was watching me, and I suppose she knew I was turning the matter over in my mind, and I do not doubt but what she realized somewhat of the struggle that was wrestling in my heart. After a while she said:
“Enfant, pass me dat bottle on ze dresser.”
I did so, and she pressed it back into my hand.
“See,” she said, “it is ze spirit dat will give you courage. I will give it to you. The moment dat you all undress yourself, tek one good long drink, and den, enfant, you will forget dat you have no clothes on your body, and dat tout le monde, he is look at you—your feet, your legs, your stomach, and every piece of you dat you do not like them to see. It will be joost like little dream. Dat firs’ time, also, I am feel ze shame—but soon it pass—and it is all forget. Courage, enfant!”
“No, no, Miss St. Denis. Oh, I can’t do it! I can’t!” I began to cry, and then she seized hold of my hands fiercely and pulled herself up in bed.
“Ah, you are ze coward—renegade! You will not help me.”
“Oh, Miss St. Denis, I might just as well go to the devil completely. Oh, I can never, never do it! Oh, if my people found out, I would be eternally disgraced and Reggie—he would never speak to me again. Then, surely, he would never, never marry me, and there would go my last hope.”