"She hated me because I looked like my father."Silence, then he spoke again:
"You've never been to my flat.I've got a swell place.I want to cut out this part of the game.I can get along without it.
You're going to move in with me, and stop this street business.
I make good money.You can have everything you want.""I prefer to keep on as I am."
"What's the difference? Aren't you mine whenever I want you?""I prefer to be free."
"_Free!_ Why, you're not free.Can't I send you to the Island any time I feel like it--just as I can the other girls?""Yes--you can do that.But I'm free, all the same.""No more than the other girls."
"Yes."
"What do you mean?"
"Unless you understand, I couldn't make you see it," she said.
She was sitting on the edge of the bed, doing up her hair, which had partly fallen down."I think you do understand.""What in the hell do you want, anyhow?" he demanded.
"If I knew--do you suppose I'd be here?"
He watched her with baffled, longing eyes."What is it," he muttered, "that's so damn peculiar about you?"It was the question every shrewd observant person who saw her put to himself in one way or another; and there was excellent reason why this should have been.
Life has a certain set of molds--lawyer, financier, gambler, preacher, fashionable woman, prostitute, domestic woman, laborer, clerk, and so on through a not extensive list of familiar types with which we all soon become acquainted.And to one or another of these patterns life fits each of us as we grow up.Not one in ten thousand glances into human faces is arrested because it has lit upon a personality that cannot be immediately located, measured, accounted for.The reason for this sterility of variety which soon makes the world rather monotonous to the seeing eye is that few of us are born with any considerable amount of personality, and what little we have is speedily suppressed by a system of training which is throughout based upon an abhorrence of originality.We obey the law of nature--and nature so abhors variety that, whenever a variation from a type happens, she tries to kill it, and, that failing, reproduces it a myriad times to make it a type.
When an original man or woman appears and all the strenuous effort to suppress him or her fails, straightway spring up a thousand imitators and copiers, and the individuality is lost in the school, the fashion, the craze.We have not the courage to be ourselves, even where there is anything in us that might be developed into something distinctive enough to win us the rank of real identity.Individuality--distinction--where it does exist, almost never shows until experience brings it out--just as up to a certain stage the embryo of any animal is like that of every other animal, though there is latent in it the most positive assertion of race and sex, of family, type, and so on.
Susan had from childhood possessed certain qualities of physical beauty, of spiritedness, of facility in mind and body--the not uncommon characteristic of the child that is the flower of passionate love.But now there was beginning to show in her a radical difference from the rest of the crowd pouring through the streets of the city.It made the quicker observers in the passing throng turn the head for a second and wondering glance.Most of them assumed they had been stirred by her superiority of face and figure.But striking faces and figures of the various comely types are frequent in the streets of New York and of several other American cities.The truth was that they were interested by her expression--an elusive expression telling of a soul that was being moved to its depths by experience which usually finds and molds mere passive material.
This expression was as evident in her mouth as in her eyes, in her profile as in her full face.And as she sat there on the edge of the bed twisting up her thick dark hair, it was this expression that disconcerted Freddie Palmer, for the first time in all his contemptuous dealings with the female sex.In his eyes was a ferocious desire to seize her and again try to conquer and to possess.
She had become almost unconscious of his presence.He startled her by suddenly crying, "Oh, you go to hell!" and flinging from the room, crashing the door shut behind him.
Maud had grown tired of the haberdasher's clerk and his presumptions upon her frank fondness which he wholly misunderstood.She had dropped him for a rough looking waiter-singer in a basement drinking place.He was beating her and taking all the money she had for herself, and was spending it on another woman, much older than Maud and homely--and Maud knew, and complained of him bitterly to everyone but himself.
She was no longer hanging round Susan persistently, having been discouraged by the failure of her attempts at intimacy with a girl who spent nearly all her spare time at reading or at plays and concerts.Maud was now chumming with a woman who preyed upon the patrons of a big Broadway hotel--she picked them up near the entrance, robbed them, and when they asked the hotel detectives to help them get back their stolen money, the detectives, who divided with her, frightened them off by saying she was a mulatto and would compel them to make a public appearance against her in open court.This woman, older and harder than most of the girls, though of quiet and refined appearance and manner, was rapidly dragging Maud down.Also, Maud's looks were going because she ate irregularly all kinds of trash, and late every night ate herself full to bursting and drank herself drunk to stupefaction.
Susan's first horror of the men she met--men of all classes--was rapidly modified into an inconsistent, therefore characteristically human, mingling of horror and tolerance.
