“It is easy to die; it must be ’ard to live like zat.”
“How lucky you find it so easy to die. Me, I’d rather be a live lackey than a dead demi-god. But let me tell you you won’t get much credit in this world for dying in the cause of virtue, and I have my doubts about the next. And it doesn’t seem to me to make much odds whether you die quickly, as you intended doing a little while ago, or whether you die slowly by hard work and poor living. Society’s going to do for you anyway. You’re Waste, that’s what you are. In every process there must be waste, even in the civilising one. You’re going to be swept into the rubbish heap pretty soon. Poor pitiful Waste! What do you mean to do now?”
Her face fell sullenly. She would not look at me any more, but she answered bravely enough.
“Me! Oh, I suppose I try again. Perhaps I starve. Perhaps I find work. Anyway, I fight.”
“What chance have you got—a poor physique, hard toil, bad air, cheap food. You’ll go on fighting till you fall, then no one will care. If it’s fighting you’re after, why don’t you fight Society, fight with your women’s weapons, your allure, your appeal to the worst in man. You can do it. Any woman can if she’s determined and forgets certain scruples. Do as I would in your case, as many men would if they had the cursed ill-luck to be women. Then, when you’re sixty you can turn round and have a pew in church, instead of rotting at thirty in Potter’s Field.”
“You advice me like zat?” I could feel that she shrank from me.
“Doesn’t it seem good, practical advice?”
“Suppose no one want me?”
“True. There’s many a woman guarding ever so jealously a jewel no man wants to steal. That’s almost more bitter than having it stolen. However, don’t you worry about that, there’s no need to.”
She raised her head which had been down-hung. Intently, oddly she looked at me.