"It's mighty hard for women with expensive tastes and small means to keep straight in New York," said she to Susan."It costs so much to live, and there are so many ways to spend money.And they always have rich lady friends who set an extravagant pace.They've got to dress--and to kind of keep up their end.So--" Ida laughed, went on: "Besides the city women are getting so they like a little sporty novelty as much as their brothers and husbands and fathers do.Oh, I'm not ashamed of my business any more.We're as good as the others, and we're not hypocrites.As my lawyer friend says, everybody's got to make a _good_ living, and good livings can't be made on the ways that used to be called on the level--they're called damfool ways now."Ida's third source of income was to her the most attractive because it had such a large gambling element in it.This was her flirtations as a respectable woman in search of lively amusement and having to take care not to be caught.There are women of all kinds who delight in deceiving men because it gives them a sweet stealthy sense of superiority to the condescending sex.In women of the Ida class this pleasure becomes as much a passion as it is in the respectable woman whom her husband tries to enslave.With Susan, another woman and one in need of education, Ida was simple and scrupulously truthful.But it would have been impossible for a man to get truth as to anything from her.She amused herself inventing plausible romantic stories about herself that she might enjoy the gullibility of the boastfully superior and patronizing male.She was devoid of sentiment, even of passion.Yet at times she affected both in the most extreme fashion.And afterward, with peals of laughter, she would describe to Susan how the man had acted, what an ass she had made of him.
"Men despise us," she said."But it's nothing to the way Idespise them.The best of them are rotten beasts when they show themselves as they are.And they haven't any mercy on us.
It's too ridiculous.Men despise a man who is virtuous and a woman who isn't.What rot!"She deceived the "regulars" without taking the trouble to remember her deceptions.They caught her lying so often that she knew they thought her untruthful through and through.But this only gave her an opportunity for additional pleasure--the pleasure of inventing lies that they would believe in spite of their distrust of her."Anyhow," said she, "haven't you noticed the liars everybody's on to are always believed and truthful people are doubted?"Upon the men with whom she flirted, she practiced the highly colored romances it would have been useless to try upon the regulars.Her greatest triumph at this game was a hard luck story she had told so effectively that the man had given her two hundred dollars.Most of her romances turned about her own ruin.As a matter of fact, she had told Susan the exact truth when she said she had taken up her mode of life deliberately;she had grown weary and impatient of the increasing poverty of a family which, like so many of the artisan and small merchant and professional classes in this day of concentrating wealth and spreading tastes for comfort and luxury, was on its way down from comfort toward or through the tenements.She was a type of the recruits that are swelling the prostitute class in ever larger numbers and are driving the prostitutes of the tenement class toward starvation--where they once dominated the profession even to its highest ranks, even to the fashionable _cocotes_ who prey upon the second generation of the rich.But Ida never told her lovers her plain and commonplace tale of yielding to the irresistible pressure of economic forces.She had made men weep at her recital of her wrongs.It had even brought her offers of marriage--none, however, worth accepting.
"I'd be a boob to marry a man with less than fifteen or twenty thousand a year, wouldn't I?" said she."Why, two of the married men who come to see me regularly give me more than they give their wives for pin money.And in a few years I'll be having my own respectable business, with ten thousand income--maybe more--and as well thought of as the next woman."Ida's dream was a house in the country, a fine flat in town, a husband in some "refined" profession and children at high-class schools."And I'll get there, don't you doubt it!" exclaimed she."Others have--of course, you don't know about them--they've looked out for that.Yes, lots of others have--but--well, just you watch your sister Ida."And Susan felt that she would indeed arrive.Already she had seen that there was no difficulty such as she had once imagined about recrossing the line to respectability.The only real problem in that matter was how to get together enough to make the crossing worth while--for what was there in respectability without money, in a day when respectability had ceased to mean anything but money?
Ida wished to take her to Mrs.Thurston and get her a favored place on the list.Susan thanked her, but said, "Not yet--not quite yet." Ida suggested that they go out together as two young married women whose husbands had gone on the road.Susan put her off from day to day.Ida finally offered to introduce her to one of the regulars: "He's a nice fellow--knows how to treat a lady in a gentlemanly way.Not a bit coarse or familiar." Susan would not permit this generosity.And all this time her funds were sinking.She had paid a second week's rent, had bought cooking apparatus, some food supplies, some necessary clothing.She was down to a five-dollar bill and a little change.
"Look here, Lorna," said Ida, between remonstrance and exasperation, "when _are_ you going to start in?"Susan looked fixedly at her, said with a slow smile, "When Ican't hold out another minute."
