The man looked at her and swore.
"You must think I'm blind," he ended.
She knew that she looked ill, but she knew that she must find money. She pleaded with age, because she knew it to be æsthetically tolerant; she ogled youth, because she knew it to be inexperienced; and she stationed herself at last near a saloon in a poorly lighted quarter, because she concluded that the men leaving such places were the only men to whom she was just then fitted successfully to appeal. It was one o'clock in the morning before she could induce even one of these to give way to her, and he, staggering with drink so that she had to support him with all her ebbing powers, insisted on stopping in an alleyway when, for the first time, she picked a pocket. A dollar and a half was all that she had as she left him, and the next dark figure that she stopped—she did not look at his face or care what sort of face it was—answered her with sharp laughter.
"A two-spot?" he cackled. "You have a few more thinks comin', old girl!"
"A dollar?" suggested Mary, tremulously.
"I got just a half—an' you ain't worth a cent more."
She took it—what would she not have taken?—and she worked on into the dawn, on with a mounting fever and a sick determination, knowing now that her chances grew with the approach of morning and finding herself, when at last the morning came, with scarcely a dollar beyond the sum due for rent.
During all the months that followed she skirted the dire edge of starvation, more than half the time too ill to rise from her bed and aware that she was at no moment fit to rise. As her cold grew steadily better her deeper illness steadily increased. It thrived on every exertion and seemed to gain each atom of strength that she lost. Things might thus continue for almost any period, but she knew that her manner of life forbade absolute cure, and that, at the end, there waited a slow and loathsome death. Anticipation made her faint; the melancholia and terror, which are symptomatic, sometimes nearly maddened her. The last vestiges of the moral sense, so early injured by previous experience, were almost wholly destroyed; there was no social consciousness; the appeal of the individual widened until it occupied her entire horizon; there was room for nothing but the craven passion for life.
Fat Dr. Helwig, when she went to see him, blinked at her out of his deep-set eyes, and told her that she was not taking sufficient rest.
Mary twisted her helpless hands.