Is that you, Mag? Well, it's about time you came home to look after
me. Fine chaperon you make, Miss Monahan! Why, didn't I tell you the
very day we took this flat what a chaperon was, and that you'd have to
be mine? Imagine Nancy Olden without a chaperon--Shocking!
No, 'tisn't late. Sit down, Maggie, there, and let me get the stool
and talk to you. Think of us two--Cruelty girls, both of us--two mangy
kittens deserted by the old cats in a city's alleys, and left mewing
with cold and hunger and dirt, out in the wet--think of us two in our
own flat, Mag!
I say, it makes me proud of us! There are times when I look at every
stick of furniture we own, and I try to pretend to it all that I'm used
to a decent roof over my head, and a dining-room, kitchen, parlor,
bedroom and bath. Oh, and I forgot the telephone the other tenant left
here till its lease is up. But at other times I stand here in the
middle of it and cry out to it, in my heart:
"Look at me, Nancy Olden, a householder, a rent-payer, the head of the
family, even if it's only a family of two and the other one Mag! Look
at me, with my name in the directory, a-paying milk bills and meat
bills and bread bills! Look at me with a place of my own, where
nobody's right's greater than my own; where no one has a right but me
and Mag; a place where--where there's nothing to hide from the police!"
There's the rub, Mag, as Hamlet says--(I went to see it the other
night, so that I could take off the Ophelia--she used to be a good
mimic herself, before she tried to be a leading lady.) It spoils you,
this sense of safeness that goes with the honesty graft. You lose the
quickness of the hunter and the nerve of the hunted. And--worse--you
lose your taste for the old risky life. You grow proud and fat, and you
love every stick in the dear, quiet little place that's your home--your
own home. You love it so that you'd be ashamed to sneak round where it
could see you--you who'd always walked upright before it with the step
of the mistress; with nothing in the world to be ashamed of; nothing to
prevent your staring each honest dish-pan in the face!
And, Mag, you try--if you're me--to fit Tom Dorgan in here--Tom Dorgan
in stripes and savage sulks still--all these months--kept away from the
world, even the world behind bars! Maggie, don't you wish Tom was a
ventriloquist or--or an acrobat or--but this isn't what I had to tell
you.
Do you know what a society entertainer is, Miss Monahan? No? Well,
look at me. Yes, I'm one. Miss Nance Olden, whose services are worth
fifty dollars a night--at least, they were one night.
Ginger brought me the note that made me a society entertainer. It was
from a Mrs. Paul B. Gates, who had been "charmed by your clever
impersonations, Miss Olden, and write to know if you have the leisure
to entertain some friends at my house on Thursday of this week."
Had I the leisure--well, rather! I showed the note to Gray, just to
make her jealous. (Oh, yes, she goes on all right in the act with Lord
Harold every night. Catch her letting me wear those things of hers
twice!) Well, she just turned up her nose.
"Of course, you won't accept?" she said.
"Of course, I will."
"Oh! I only thought you'd feel as I should about appearing before a
lot of snobs, who'll treat you like a servant and--"
"Who'll do nothing of the sort and who'll pay you well for it," put in
Obermuller. He had come up and was reading the note I had handed to
him. "You just say yes, Nance," he went on, after Gray had bounced of
to her dressing-room. "It isn't such a bad graft and--and this is just
between us two, mind--that little beggar, Tausig, has begun his tricks
since you turned his offer down. They can make things hot for me, and
if they do, it won't be so bad for you to go in for this sort of
thing--unless you go over to the Trust--"