"Well, whatta you going to do about it, kiddo--huh?"
"I--I'm going to--quit!"
He laughed and let her squirm from his hold, strolled over to the dresser mirror, pulled his red four-in-hand upward from its knot and tugged his collar open.
"You're not going to quit, kiddo! You ain't got the nerve!"
He leaned to the mirror and examined the even rows of teeth, and grinned at himself like a Hallowe'en pumpkin to flash whiter their whiteness.
"Ain't I! Which takes the most nerve, I'd like to know, stickin' to you and your devilishness or strikin' out for myself like I been raised to do? I was born a worm, and I ain't never found the cocoon that would change me into a butterfly. I--I had as swell a job up at Gregory's as a girl ever had. I'm an expert stenographer, I am! I got a diploma from--"
"Why don't you get your job back, baby? You been up there twice to my knowin'; maybe the third time'll be a charm. Don't let me keep you, kiddo."
The sluice-gates of her fear and anger opened suddenly, and tears rained down her cheeks. She wiped them away with her bare palm.
"It's because you took the life and soul out of me! They don't want me back because I ain't nothin' but a rag any more. I guess they're ashamed to take me back cause I'm in--in your class. Ten months of standing for your funny business and dodging landladies, and waitin' up nights, and watchin' you and your crooked starvation game would take the life out of any girl. It would! It would!"
"Don't fuss at me any more, Goldie-eyes. It's gettin' hard for me to keep down; and I don't want--want to begin gettin' ugly."
Mr. Trimp advanced toward his wife gently--gently.
"Don't come near me! I know what's coming; but you ain't going to get me this time with your oily ways. You're the kind that, walks on a girl with spiked heels and tries to kiss the sores away. I'm going to quit!"
Mr. Trimp plucked at the faint hirsute adornment of his upper lip and folded his black-and-white waistcoat over the back of a chair. He fumbled it a bit.
"Stay where you're put, you--you bloomin' vest, you!"
"I--I got friends that'll help me, I have--even if I ain't ever laid eyes on 'em since the day I married you. I got friends--_real_ friends! Addie'll take me in any minute, day or night. Eddie Bopp could get me a job in his firm to-morrow if--if I ask him. I got friends! You've kept me from 'em; but I ain't afraid to look 'em up. I'm not!"
He advanced to where she stood beneath the waving gas-flame, a pet phrase clung to his lips, and he stumbled over it.
"My--my little--pussy-cat!"
"You're drunk!"
"No, I ain't, baby--only dog-tired. Dog-tired! Don't fuss at me! You just don't know how much I love you, baby!"
"Who wouldn't fuss, I'd like to know?"
Her voice was like ice crackling with thaw. He took her lax waist in his embrace and kissed her on the brow.
"Don't, honey--don't! Me and Cutty had a sucker out, I tell you."
"You--you always get your way with me. You treat me like a dog; but you know you can wind me round--wind me round."
"Baby! Baby!"
He smoothed her hair away from her salt-bitten eyes, laid his cheek pat against hers, and murmured to her through the scratch in his throat, like a parrakeet croons to its mate.
"Pussy-cat! Pussy!"
The river of difference between them dried in the warm sun of her forgiveness, and she sobbed on his shoulder with the exhaustion of a child after a tantrum.
"You won't leave me alone nights no more, Harry?"
"Thu--thu--thu--such a little Goldie-eyes!"
"I can't stand for the worry of the board no more, Harry. McCaskys are gettin' ugly. I ain't got a decent rag to my back, neither."
"I'm going to take a shipping-room job next week, honey, and get back in harness. Bill's going to fix me up. There ain't nothin' in this rotten game, and I'm going to get out."
"Sure?"
"Sure, Goldie."
"You ain't been drinking, Harry?"
"Sure I ain't. Me and Cutty had a rube out, I tell you."
"You'll keep straight, won't you, Harry? You're killin' me, boy, you are."
"Come, dry your face, baby."
He reached to his hip-pocket for his handkerchief, and with it a sparse shower of red and green and pink and white and blue confetti showered to the floor like snow through a spectrum. Goldie slid from his embrace and laughed--a laugh frapped with the ice of scorn and chilled as her own chilled heart.
"Liar!" she said, and trembled as she stood.
His lips curled again into the expression that so ill-fitted his albinism.
"You little cat! You can bluff me!"
"I knew you was up at the Crescent Cotillon! I felt it in my bones. I knew you was up there when I read on the bill-boards that the Red Slipper was dancing there. I knew where you was every night while I been sittin' here waitin'! I knew--I knew--"
The piano-salesman rapped against the folding-doors thrice, with distemper and the head of a cane. At that instant the lower half of Mr. Trimp's face protruded suddenly into a lantern-jawed facsimile of a blue-ribbon English bull; his hand shot out and hurled the chair that stood between them half-way across the room, where it fell on its side against the wash-stand and split a rung.
"You--you little devil, you!"
The second-floor front beat a tattoo of remonstrance; but there was a sudden howling as of boiling surf in Mr. Trimp's ears, and the hot ember of an oath dropped from his lips.
"You little devil! You been hounding me with the quit game for eight months. Now you gotta quit!"
"I--I--"
"There ain't a man livin' would stand for your long face and naggin'! If you don't like my banking-hours and my game and the company I keep you quit, kiddo! Quit! Do you hear?"
"Will--I--quit? Well--"
"Yeh; I been up to the Crescent Confetti--every night this week, just like you say! I been round live wires, where there ain't no long, white faces shoving board bills and whining the daylights out of me."
"Oh, you--you ain't nothing but--"
"Sure, I been up there! I can get two laughs for every long face you pull on me. You quit if you want to, kiddo--there ain't no strings to you. Quit--and the sooner the better!" Mr. Trimp grasped his wife by her taut wrists and jerked her to him until her head fell backward and the breath jumped out of her throat in a choke. "Quit--and the sooner the better!"
"Lemme go! Lem-me-go!"
He tightened his hold and inclined toward her, so close that their faces almost touched. With his hot clutches on her wrists and his hot breath in her face it seemed to her that his eyes fused into one huge Cyclopean circle that spun and spun in the center of his forehead, like a fiery Catharine Wheel against a night sky.
"Bah! You little whiteface, you! You played a snide trick on me, anyway--lost your looks the second month and went dead like a punctured tire! Quit when you want to--there ain't no strings. Quit now!"
He flung her from him, so that she staggered backward four steps and struck her right cheek sharply against the mantel corner. A blue-glass vase fell to the hearth and was shattered. With the salt of fray on his lips, he kicked at the overturned chair and slammed a closet door so that the windows rattled. A carpet-covered hassock lay in his path, and he hurled it across the floor. Goldie edged toward the wardrobe, hugging the wall like one who gropes in the dark.
"If you're right bright, kiddo, you'll keep out of my way. You got me crazy to-night--crazy! Do you hear me, you little--"
"My hat!"
He flung it to her from its peg, with her jacket, so that they fell crumpled at her feet.
"You're called on your bluff this time, little one. This is one night it's quits for you--and I ain't drunk, neither!"
She crowded her rampant hair, flowing as Ophelia's, into her cheap little boyish hat and fumbled into her jacket. A red welt, shaped like a tongue of flame, burned diagonally down her right cheek.
"Keep out of my way--you! You got me crazy to-night--crazy to-night!"
He watched her from the opposite side of the room with lowered head, like a bull lunging for onslaught.
She moved toward the door with the rigidity of an automaton doll, her magnetized eyes never leaving his reddening face and her hands groping ahead. Her mouth was moist and no older than a child's; but her skin dead, as if coated over with tallow. She opened the door slowly, fearing to break the spell--then suddenly slipped through the aperture and slammed it after her. Then the slam of another door; the scurrying of feet down cold stone steps that sprung echoes in the deserted street.
The douse of cold air stung her flaming cheek; a policeman glanced after her; a drunken sailor staggered out of a black doorway, and her trembling limbs sped faster--a labyrinth of city streets and rows of blank-faced houses; an occasional pedestrian, who glanced after her because she wheezed in her throat, and ever so often gathered her strength and broke into a run; then a close, ill-smelling apartment house, with a tipsy gas-light mewling in the hall, and a dull-brown door that remained blank to her knocks and rings. The sobs were rising in her throat, and the trembling in her limbs shook her as with ague.
A knock that was more of a pound and a frenzied rattling of the knob! Finally from the inside of the door a thump-thump down a long hallway--and the door creaked open cautiously, suspiciously!