Nobody. Vance Louis Joseph

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СКАЧАТЬ the sake of a sixty-cent table d' hôte and a trip to Coney. But you needn't worry; it'll be hotter than this before Sammy warms up enough to singe anything. His intentions are so praiseworthy they pain him; he blushes every time he has to recognise the sex question long enough to discuss the delights of monogamy in a two-family house within commuting distance of Prospect Park South."

      "You don't mean to say you've got that far along-already!"

      "That's the reward of a year's steady angling, honey."

      "Heavens, but how you must carry on with Sammy!"

      "Believe me, it's something scandalous," sighed Lucy Spode.

      "But why-" Sally began in a tone of expostulation.

      The other quickened with a flash of temper. "Don't ask me! I came No'th to study art and mingle with the world of intellect and fashion, and after three years I'm drawing heads for fashion magazines at a dollar per, and I know a minor poet who's acquainted with the assistant editor of The Scrap-Book, and the one man I know who owns a dress-suit gets fifty cents an hour for posing in it. If that isn't enough to make me welcome even the prospect of married life with Sammy Myerick and a woman to do the washing, I don't know-"

      "Well, if you aren't crazy about Sammy, why not chuck him? Marriage isn't the last resource for a girl like you. You've got just as many wits to live on as the next one. This town's full of young women no better-looking than either of us, and with even less intelligence, who manage pretty comfortably, thank you, on the living the world owes them."

      "Sally Manvers!" cried the Southern girl, scandalised, "what a way to talk!"

      "Oh, all right," said the other indifferently. "Where's Mary Warden?"

      "Lyric Hall-rehearsing."

      "Lucky Mary!"

      Lucy Spode looked up in astonishment. "Lucky!" she protested; "dancing till she's ready to drop, in this awful heat, and no pay for rehearsals!"

      "All the same," Sally contended, "she's got some chance, some right to hope for better things. She's an understudy, and her principal might fall ill-or something. That's better than marrying a man you don't care for-or clerking at Huckster's for seven dollars a week."

      "Cat," said Miss Spode dispassionately. "Who's been mussing your fur?"

      "Life."

      The steel pen was poised again while Lucy Spode surveyed Sally Manvers suspiciously.

      "What do you mean-life?" she demanded.

      "This sort of thing." Sally waved a comprehensive hand. "Living here, in this hole, and most of the time not even able to pay my share of the rent; slaving for a dollar a day, and losing part of that in unjust fines; walking to and from the store to save car fare; eating the sort of food we do eat; never having pretty clothes or pleasures of any sort. I don't call this a life!"

      "You've got indigestion," Miss Spade diagnosed shrewdly. "I'll bet two bits you've been eating napoleons again."

      "I have got indigestion, but it's thanks only to being fed up with existence-the kind we lead, at least. I want something better."

      "The vote, perhaps?"

      "For two cents I'd throw something at you."

      The artist uncoiled her legs, stuck the pen in her hair, set the ink-bottle down on the floor, sighed, and, lifting the drawing-board, held it at arm's length, studying her work through narrowed eyelids.

      "Then it must be a man," she concluded absently. "When a woman of twenty-seven wants something and doesn't know what it is, it's either the vote or a man."

      "Oh, shut up."

      "With man an odds-on favourite in the betting." Miss Spode laid the board aside with a "Thank goodness, that's finished!" and, rising, stretched her cramped limbs. "What I'd like to know," she persisted, "is whether it's man abstract or a man concrete."

      Sally laughed bitterly. "Take a good look at me, dear-as an exhibit, not as a friend-and tell me honestly whether any man worth having would glance twice at me."

      "You can be pretty enough," Miss Spade returned seriously, "when you want to take the trouble-"

      "But I don't-ever."

      "The more fool you."

      "What's the use-on seven a week? What's the good of being pretty in rags like these? It only gets a girl in wrong. I don't care how fetching I might make myself seem-"

      "But you ought to."

      "Look here; do you know how a reporter would describe me?"

      "Of course; 'respectable working girl.'"

      "Well, then, men worth while don't run after 'respectable working girls'; they leave that to things who wear 'Modish Men's Clothing'-with braided cuffs and pockets slashed on the bias! – and stand smirking on corners we have to pass going home. Do you think I'd do my hair becomingly, and-and all that-to attract such creatures?"

      "So it's abstract man. Thought so!"

      "It's starvation, that's what it is. I'm sick for want of what other girls get without asking-pretty clothes and-and all that sort of thing."

      "Meaning," the artist interpreted gravely, "love."

      "Well," Sally demanded, defiant, "why not?"

      "Why not indeed?" Lucy returned obliquely, wandering round the studio and collecting various articles of wearing-apparel toward her appearance in public.

      "I'm twenty-seven," Miss Manvers declared mutinously. "I'll never be younger-I want to be loved before I'm old!"

      She paused, viewed with reassuring amusement Lucy's countenance of perplexity, and laughed again.

      "I've had ten years of independence; and what has it brought me? The reward of virtue: that swaybacked couch for my bed, Uneeda biscuit for my bread, and for salt-tears of envy!"

      "Virtue is its own reward," Lucy enunciated severely.

      "Virtue is its only reward, you mean!"

      "You don't talk fit to eat."

      "You know what I mean. Only mental bankrupts go to the devil because they're hungry. I'm less bothered about keeping body and soul together – Huckster's seven a week does that after a fashion-than about keeping soul and mind together."

      "It sounds reasonable."

      "I'm desperate, I tell you! And there's more than one resort of desperation for a girl of intelligence."

      "As, for instance-"

      "Well-you've named one."

      "Man?"

      "That's the animal's first name."

      "But you've just pointed out, a successful campaign demands a wardrobe."

      "Even that can be had if one's unscrupulous enough."

      "Whatever do you mean?"

      "To seek happiness where I СКАЧАТЬ