“That was hitting below the belt, wasn’t it? My turn to apologize now! But it isn’t often I meet fellows like you—fellows who’ll talk to me instead of wanting to paw me—guys who are drunk, and——” Her voice trailed off. She stared unseeingly at the crowd as it pranced past the table. “God! I don’t blame men for the way things are with us girls! If I was a man I’d play the game that way, too, I guess. They haven’t got a thing staked on the turn of the wheel. But we’ve got everything to lose. And if we aren’t careful we lose it; that’s all.”
The wind came up again and tore at the house, and around the house, with concentrated enmity. It played with the loose shell windows as the cat with the mouse. Inspired by this lack of control in the elements, Kirwin became elemental in his questioning of the girl.
“Born and brought up in New York, on Eighth Avenue, you say? Then why out here?”
“What’s a girl who’s poor to do to feed herself? Not but what the men’ll feed her—if she’s a fool! A man goes and marries, and gets a girl baby. And does he have that girl baby taught a trade when she leaves grammar school, like he does his sons? He does, like hell! He throws her out—in front of men—to catch a husband! ’Tisn’t fair to the girls. Look at me: I didn’t know how to do a thing except dance. I’d learned how to do that on the sidewalks, to hurdy-gurdies.”
The noise of the rain on the roof deadened her voice, so that the men had to lean across the table in order to hear her next words.
“I said I’d tell you a few things. All right! I will! It may help you in your bets on other women.”
Her voice became shriller, more filled with excitement. The rain no longer deadened it; it was charged with an electricity that carried it above the storm.
“When I knew that if I didn’t want to marry one of the poor simps I met—with his hair slicked down with grease till it looked like shiny black shoes—I’d have to scratch for my living, I got busy and hunted a job in a cheap dance hall in that part of town. My job was to dance with any dirty, smelly man who came in and hadn’t got a girl along. Not much of a trade, but it was a long sight better than the one my sister took up—on the streets! That was another trade you didn’t have to be trained for!
“‘Mary, be careful!’ my mother kept telling me. ‘A girl has got to be careful—because the men won’t be careful for her.’
“By the time I’d learned the game of taking care of myself, I’d worked up to a sweller dance hall on Broadway. The fellows who came in there were clean, except in their minds. But I kept saying to myself: ‘Mary, be careful!’