"
"As you please," said Susan indifferently. "I don't in the
least care what happens to me."
"We'll see about that," cried he, enraged. "I'll give you a
week to brace up in."
The look he shot at her by way of finish to his sentence was
menacing enough. But she was not disturbed; these signs of
anger tended to confirm her in her sense of security from him.
For it was wholly unlike the Freddie Palmer the rest of the
world knew, to act in this irresolute and stormy way. She knew
that Palmer, in his fashion, cared for her--better still, liked
her--liked to talk with her, liked to show--and to develop--the
aspiring side of his interesting, unusual nature for her benefit.
A week passed, during which she did not see him. But she heard
that he was losing on both the cards and the horses and was
drinking wildly. A week--ten days--then----
One night, as she came out of a saloon a block or so down Seventh
Avenue from Forty-second, a fly cop seized her by the arm.
"Come along," said he roughly. "You're drinking and
soliciting. I've got to clear the streets of some of these
tarts. It's got so decent people can't move without falling
over 'em."
Susan had not lived in the tenement districts where the
ignorance and the helplessness and the lack of a voice that can
make itself heard among the ruling classes make the sway of the
police absolute and therefore tyrannical--she had not lived
there without getting something of that dread and horror of the
police which to people of the upper classes seems childish or
evidence of secret criminal hankerings.
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