It was the deep, contralto voice of English Evelyn, and, as Violet replied in the affirmative, the woman softly entered.
Her tall, almost thin, figure was draped in a soiled pink kimona; her yellow hair seemed merely to have been tossed upon her head and to have been left precisely as it happened to alight; her blue eyes were dull, and her hard, narrow face, with its spots of high color over the cheek-bones, showed more plainly than common, the usually faint little red veins that lay close below its white skin.
"My Gawd," she sighed, as she sank upon the bed and curled up at its foot, "there are some things I can't get accustomed to, and that"—she nodded in the direction whence the cry had come—"that's one of them."
She spoke in a weary voice, a voice with almost no animation, but with a curious mixture of the cockney of the New Yorker and with a rising inflection that saved what she said from monotony.
"What was it?" asked Violet.
"You ought to know. It was another of them."
"You mean——" The question trailed into nothingness on Violet's whitening lips.
"Yes," said Evelyn, seizing a pillow and snuggling her broad shoulders against it. "Got a cig?" And then, as her hostess produced a box from under the mattress: "It does so get upon my nerves. Why, sometimes they come here young enough to play with dollies. This time there was no more sleep for boiby. Had to run downstairs and rig a B. and S., and then come up to girlie here for company."
"How—how did this happen?"
"How the deuce do you suppose? One story is pretty much all of them, my dear, and one about as narsty as the others."