For two weeks she led a dulled and purposeless existence. She succeeded in crowding the day, in shutting out opportunity for thought, in consuming the night so as to return with enough fatigue to fall into heavy troubled slumber. The bright moments were those when she went with Snyder's little girl on brief excursions into the country, for a moment's forgetfulness among the woods, an hour of willing slavery to childish whims, throwing herself into foolish romping games that brought a comforting sense of the world's unrealities. The sensation that childish clinging brought her at times surprised her by its intensity. She had never thought of having children, and yet this child awoke strange yearnings. Troubled, she told herself that it was the weakness of her suffering intensified by loneliness, and satisfied herself with this reply.
Her days were curiously divided. She saw Harrigan Blood and Sassoon, but to their assiduous pursuit she flung only crumbs. She saw them in the tantalizing publicity of the down-stairs parlor—rarely, for an hour perhaps; but she steadfastly refused further concessions. Busby, clearly inspired, sought to entice her to many alluring entertainments, some conventional, others not quite so. She refused all. She avoided all parties where she might encounter the one man, avoiding too that entourage of his which she had so eagerly sought with a sense of right on the occasion of the luncheon to De Joncy.
Instead, she sought desperately to return to the light bantering existence she had formerly known. The glimpses she had had into the upper world frightened her. It laid before her crude vanities which she would have preferred to ignore; it started temptations where she had been conscious of none. In her present depression, an instinct bade her flee all that dazzled her; a voice whispered to her that, in the mad impulses of a groping despair, she might not always resist, or care to resist—that it were better not to know that luxury and power lay so easily at hand, ready on the feminine fingers of Sassoon or the imperious clutch of Harrigan Blood.
Nor was the temptation a fancied one, for the hunger that had awakened was an inner one. In her short glimpse of luxury she had become aware of new longings, material cravings, vanities of the flesh. Occasionally in the mornings, to escape from her moods, she went out for long walks past tempting shop-windows—those shop-windows of New York, more devastating than all the flesh hunters, on whose balances lie how many feminine souls! She would stop breathlessly, hypnotized, hanging on visions of gorgeous silks, imperial furs, opera-cloaks that might transform a peasant into a queen, jewels that danced before her eyes, fascinating them strangely with their serpentine coldness.
She could not prevent her lawless imagination from wandering, visualizing another Doré Baxter, who swept gorgeously among the costly women of the opera and the restaurants, compelling a startled attention, luxuriant, radiant, triumphant with the sinister blinking eyes of Sassoon always over her glowing shoulder. What constantly started this torturing image before her was that she had now no doubt as to what she could do with him. At first, incredulously, she could not believe that his interest would survive a week—that he would not depart furiously, once the scales had fallen from his hungry glance and he had realized that in her mocking society nothing was reserved for him but humiliation and deception. But, to her amazement, she found it was not so; that something had penetrated profoundly into that chilled soul, and that the passion which had been kindled was one that sweeps men on to irretrievable follies, unthinkable sacrifices, at the hands of a calm woman. Sassoon—no. But Sassoon and the lure of a thousand shop-windows spreading before her their soft enwrapping mysteries of splendor.... Occasionally, gazing entranced before some bewildering evening gown, a peignoir all lace and cloud, a rope of milky pearls, she felt this sensation so compellingly that she would retreat breathlessly, trembling from head to foot.
What made the temptation doubly insidious was her own awakened point of view. She saw now the immense difference in scale between the upper world and the semi-Bohemian state of the Salamanders. Their desperate struggle to make both ends meet, their prodigies of imaginative planning, their campaigns of economy, all to procure a few insignificant dollars— this struggle of wits which had once exhilarated her now depressed her fearfully. She had a sort of second sight; she saw now the approach of failure, the inexorable famine that lay beyond the short dominion of youth. She had always dimly perceived this danger, saying to herself that she could cast the die before another cast it for her. But now, thinking of her twenty-third year still six months away, she had a feeling as if she were being hurried toward her choice, frantically driven; and yet, she could not see where all this whirlwind force was carrying her.
At this moment her mentality began. She felt a new birth of her reason—that unquiet searching of the self so often child of grief. She began to question—to analyze and to strive to penetrate the future. She saw herself in others, the past and the possible future: Ida Summers, arriving like a skipping child, all heedless laughter, inconscient, holding out avid arms for flowers, and Winona, a figure with half averted face, hand upon the latch, ready to depart. No, she would not be like Winona; that was impossible, she said, with a shudder; Winona was but a figure standing as a warning!
Winona herself, occupied with rehearsals, went out of her day, momentarily. Doré took her to the opera on the Monday nights that Mr. Peavey had placed at her disposal. She never made the mistake of seeking a male escort. She felt always that Peavey's timid eyes were on her, hidden somewhere in that vast concourse, spying on her actions, waiting suspiciously to see if her companion were a man, a young and ardent man of her own generation. Nor was this entirely surmise. The second Monday, he had loomed at her side out of nowhere, happiness in his eyes, radiant to find her so discreetly accompanied. He had taken them to supper afterward. It seemed to her that Winona had put herself out to attract him—excessively so, considering her proprietorship; for the etiquette of Salamanders is imperious on such points. But then, Winona was in a curious mood, brooding, gay by starts and as suddenly silent. Doré sometimes wondered if things were working out well at the theater. In her determination to resist this life—Massingale's world, into which she had blundered so unluckily—she turned hungrily to the company of the other Salamanders, with a new need of woman's sympathy and understanding. Besides Winona and Ida, there were on the floor below Estelle Monks, whom she knew well and Clarice Stuart and Anita Morgan, roommates, whom she knew slightly, despite their repeated advances. They were trained nurses, lately arrived from the far West, older than the rest, but Salamanders by their craving for excitement and their fidelity to the rule of never allowing business to interfere with pleasure. Doré had always had that curiosity which each Salamander feels for another. How did they play their games? Had they methods which she had not divined? Above all, what was to be the end of the comedy? Readily welcomed, she drifted into their society for a week or so. They engaged themselves only for the day, and yet, despite the exacting strain they underwent (and, to her surprise, she soon discovered that they were passionately devoted to their profession), each night by half past seven they came tripping down the steps to where Doré, with the escorts, was waiting in an automobile to whirl them to the theater, to a long drive into the country, dinner and an impromptu dance, and then home by the midnight stars, ready to rise with the dawn and begin the day's toil. They seemed made of iron.
They had their stories to tell, their analyses of men and life. Doctors, it seemed, were sometimes human, especially old ones. Often they had in the party men whose names were famous in the profession, abrupt incisive tyrants, neither abrupt nor tyrannical with them, submitting to their banter, prodigal of compliments, just as difficult to be kept in place as other men. Doré listened in astonishment to their conversations, amazed at the impertinence of the girls, and the ready laughing acceptance of those who, in the day, commanded them.
"Why?" said Clarice Stuart, when she had once voiced this amazement. "Putting a different coat on them isn't going to change them, is it? Lud bless you, girl, I thought the way you did, once. I got over it quickly! Do you want to know my first experience here, when I got to New York? An eye-opener, let me tell you! I was substitute on a surgical case,—private house, patient sleeping under opiates,—when Doctor Outerwaite, the same we were with the other night up at the Arena, came in for examination. 'Course, in that case, the family always go out of the room until the examination is over. Outerwaite! Lord, we'd heard nothing but Outerwaite all through the West! I was frightened stiff! They say he's a devil in the operating-room, swearing like a trooper if everything doesn't go like clockwork! Imagine me! First case in little New York! Well, I shooed the family out, closed the doors and stood at the patient's side—he quite out of his head, delirium and opiates; me watching the Doc, and ready to jump at a sneeze. And what do you think he did? Go to the patient? Nixie! He came straight up to little me, slipped his arm around, and said: