“Unless we are clever enough to get somebody else to do the work for us,” she sneered.
“Then I think we lose most of the fun.”
Miss Walters stared at him skeptically.
“What’s the use of your taking that lofty tone with me?”
Brainard laughed good-naturedly. He found in this case, as he had in so many others, that a little personal contact with an enemy modifies and humanizes any antagonism. “Eat with an enemy and lose your hate,” is an old proverb, the truth of which he was proving. In spite of the hardness and vulgarity of Miss Lorilla Walters, actress and stenographer, there was something pathetic in her commonplace struggle with life, which he felt through her brief admissions. She had been fighting all her life for herself with somewhat coarse weapons, the only ones she knew how to use, and her appearance, now that she had lost the advantage of youth and was declining towards middle age, her cheap clothes, her defiant manner,—all told of the losing game. He was already beginning to wonder what he could do for Krutzmacht’s old stenographer, wondering whether by any chance she could be fitted into the People’s company, when his amiable meditations were disagreeably interrupted by the actress.
“It’s no use your playing the great philanthropist with me,” she said truculently. “I know what you are.”
“What?”
“A crook.”
“You think so?”
“I happen to know it.”