But I can't help that now. It's too late. I can only send you money. And if it's true you have a child, for God's sake take her in time or she'll turn into what you are.
And that is why I send you any money at all—on the remote chance that you are not lying. Keep away from me, Harry.
ROSALINDA QUEST.
So he did not trouble her, he knew her of old; and besides he was too ill, too dazed with drugs to bother with such things.
He lost every penny of the money in Quint's gambling house within a month.
So the Quest family, father, mother and little daughter sifted through the wide, coarse meshes of the very last social stratum that same winter, and landed on the ultimate mundane dump heap.
Quest now lay all day across a broken iron bed, sometimes stupefied, sometimes violent; his wife, dismissed from the Hippodrome for flagrant cause, now picked up an intermittent living and other things in an east-side rink. The child still remained about, somewhere, anywhere—a dirty, ragged, bruised, furtive little thing, long accustomed to extremes of maudlin demonstration and drug-crazed cruelty, frightened witness of dreadful altercations and of more dreadful reconciliations, yet still more stunned than awakened, more undeveloped than precocious, as though the steady accumulation of domestic horrors had checked mental growth rather than sharpened her wits with cynicism and undesirable knowledge.
Not yet had her environment distorted and tainted her speech, for her father had been an educated man, and what was left of him still employed grammatical English, often correcting the nasal, up-state vocabulary of the mother—the beginning of many a terrible quarrel.
So the child skulked about, alternately ignored or whined over, cursed or caressed, petted or beaten, sometimes into insensibility.
Otherwise she followed them about instinctively, like a crippled kitten.