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.
Nobody, nothing, was either good or bad, but all veered like
weathercocks in the shifting wind. She decided that people
were steadily good only where their lot happened to be cast in
a place in which the good wind held steadily, and that those
who were usually bad simply had the misfortune to have to live
where the prevailing winds were bad.
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