"Of course I am. It'd be a pity if I couldn't earn that much."
Mrs. Foote looked at Mary's face and seemed to doubt the foundation for her assurance.
"Well," she sighed, "I certainly hope you can."
For some minutes after the door closed, Mary lay still. She had again been brought face to face with the most poignant of tragedies, the tragedy of living.
An hour earlier, had she questioned herself, she would have said that she was careless of life, that neither this earth nor the quitting of it interested her, that continued existence was a matter of indifference. Then she was in that state of exultation above things mundane which is produced only by great sorrow, great joy, or the great revenges that are both grief and triumph. But now the words of the landlady had brought her back from the indulgence of contemplation to the necessity of action. Mary's insidious, implacable disease had completed what her business had begun, and what her business alone would have completed far more slowly. The few emotions that she was now capable of feeling were the more intense because of their rarity, but their intensity was equaled by their brevity and, when the moment had gone, it left her even more of a moral weakling than it had found her.
She knew Mrs. Foote and her tribe too well to deceive herself as to what must happen should the morning dawn upon an empty stocking. Life held nothing for which Mary greatly cared, but the instant of death contained all of which she was afraid. She did not greatly want to harm others by plying her trade in her present condition, but she could not think of others. Each step would be a separate wound to her tortured body and her throbbing head, but she understood that the landlady had to wring out the rents by the means that conditions had forced upon her; and so the worst of fears, the fear of poverty, which is the fear of death, took this sick woman from her bed, dressed her in her best frock, and sent her out into the street.
Along Sixth Avenue, where fortune had often, theretofore, been kind to her, she met no significant glances. A passing girl or two, having missed her for the last few evenings, proffered a casual sympathy; but that was all. Through the open doors of the Haymarket, she turned in, but there even the women at first disregarded her. Several men that she recognized in the boxes of the gallery around the little hall nodded, but immediately looked away. The one man that she happened to know better than any of the others did not appear at all to remember her, and his neighbor, who had frequently accompanied her, signaled elsewhere.
She was lonely. She approached two women who were circling the floor, arm in arm. She addressed them with the familiarity of the craft.
"Hello," she said.
The one woman smiled, but her companion, a formidable, tailor-made personage, swelled with dignity.