"It was bad, but it wasn't so bad as being indoors, my dear. That's what most girls think about it anyway, and that's why they never go home before ten or eleven. How else do the moving-picture shows keep running and how else do the dance-halls make their cakes and ale?"
"The dance-halls?" The word was new to Violet.
"Yes, my dear, I said the dance-halls—where you pay five cents to dance in the dust, with the windows nailed fast to start a thirst, and then buy you bad beer of the kind proprietor. That's where the lodger took this girl, and that's where she learned to drink."
"Too much?"
"Chuck it, dearie, chuck it. Among all the wasters I've known, I've never found one drunkard: they all called themselves moderate drinkers. Well, this girlie played double for a bit, and then met a nice young man that wanted to marry her next day. She woke up here."
"Did they drug her?"
"Did they drug you? They don't have to drug you: you know that. The minute a girl tells me she was drugged, I say to myself: 'You're the kind that walk in and won't take "No" for an answer.' No, you catch flies with syrup; you don't shoot them with machine-guns. Narsty business, no?"
Violet was hearing for the first time how life made the net in which it had taken her. She passed her hand across her burning eyes.
"You seem to have seen a lot," she said.
"Haven't I just? I had my own little flat—to myself, too—once upon a time, and I kept my eyes about me. There was the Dago woman that owned a fruit-stand on my corner. She lived in an alley off Houston Street, and had a sixteen-year-old daughter who worked twelve hours a day rolling cigarettes.—Chuck me another, there's a good girlie. Thanks, awfully.—That girl hated her work—can you blame her?—met a man that told her she wouldn't have to work any more, and good-by."