And
you'll be warm there."
"Here! Here!" cried the tipsy man. "What're you two whispering
about? Come along, skinny. No offense. I like 'em slim." And he
made coarse and pointed remarks about the sluggishness of fat
women, laughing loudly at his own wit.
The two girls did not hear. The wind straight from the Arctic
was plying its hideous lash upon their defenseless bodies.
"Come on, lovey!" cried the man. "Let's go in out of the cold."
"Oh, Lorna! You can't go with a drunken man! I'll--I'll take
him. I can stand it better'n you. You can go when there's a
gentleman "
"You don't know," said Susan. "Didn't I tell you I'd been
through the worst?"
"Are you coming?" broke in the man, shaking his head to scatter
the clouds over his sight.
The cold was lashing Susan's body; and she was seeing the
tenement she had left--the vermin crawling, the filth
everywhere, the meal bugs in the rotting corn meal--and Jeb
Ferguson. "Wait in the restaurant," said she to Etta. "Didn't I
tell you I'm a nobody. This is what's expected of me." The wind
clawed and tore at her quivering flesh. "It's cold, Etta. Go get
warm. Good-by."
She yielded to the tipsy man's tugging at her arm. Etta stood as
if paralyzed, watching the two move slowly westward. But cold
soon triumphed over horror. She retraced her steps toward Vine
Street. At the corner stood an elderly man with an iron-gray
beard.
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