"If I don't go in for the high society game," he went on, "I'll have nothing to do.I'll be adrift--gambling, drinking, yawning about and going to pieces.A man's got to have something to work for--and he can't work unless it seems to him worth doing."She was staring into the mirror, her elbows on the table, her chin upon her interlaced fingers.It would be difficult to say how much of his gentleness to her was due to her physical charm for him, and how much to his respect for her mind and her character.He himself would have said that his weakness was altogether the result of the spell her physical charm cast over him.But it is probable that the other element was the stronger.
"You'll not be selfish, Susan?" urged he."You'll give me a square deal.""Yes--I see that it does look selfish," said she."A little while ago I'd not have been able to see any deeper than the looks of it.Freddie, there are some things no one has a right to ask of another, and no one has a right to grant."The ugliness of his character was becoming less easy to control.This girl whom he had picked up, practically out of the gutter, and had heaped generosities upon, was trying his patience too far.But he said, rather amiably:
"Certainly I'm not asking any such thing of you in asking you to become a respectable married woman, the wife of a rich man.""Yes--you are, Freddie," replied she gently."If I married you, I'd be signing an agreement to lead your life, to give up my own--an agreement to become a sort of woman I've no desire to be and no interest in being; to give up trying to become the only sort of woman I think is worth while.When we were discussing my coming with you, you made this same proposal in another form.I refused it then.And I refuse it now.It's harder to refuse now, but I'm stronger.""Stronger, thanks to the money you've got from me--the money and the rest of it," sneered he.
"Haven't I earned all I've got?" said she, so calmly that he did not realize how the charge of ingratitude, unjust though it was, had struck into her.
"You have changed!" said he."You're getting as hard as the rest of us.So it's all a matter of money, of give and take--is it? None of the generosity and sentiment you used to be full of? You've simply been using me.""It can be put that way," replied she."And no doubt you honestly see it that way.But I've got to see my own interest and my own right, Freddie.I've learned at last that Imustn't trust to anyone else to look after them for me.""Are you riding for a fall--Queenie?"
At "Queenie" she smiled faintly."I'm riding the way I always have," answered she."It has carried me down.But--it has brought me up again." She looked at him with eyes that appealed, without yielding."And I'll ride that way to the end--up or down," said she."I can't help it.""Then you want to break with me?" he asked--and he began to look dangerous.
"No," replied she."I want to go on as we are....I'll not be interfering in your social ambitions, in any way.Over here it'll help you to have a mistress who--" she saw her image in the glass, threw him an arch glance--"who isn't altogether unattractive won't it? And if you found you could go higher by marrying some woman of the grand world--why, you'd be free to do it."He had a way of looking at her that gave her--and himself--the sense of a delirious embrace.He looked at her so, now.He said:
"You take advantage of my being crazy about you--_damn_ you!""Heaven knows," laughed she, "I need every advantage I can find."He touched her--the lightest kind of touch.It carried the sense of embrace in his look still more giddily upward.
"Queenie!" he said softly.
