The first-floor front she opened slowly, pausing after every creak of the door; and the gas she fumbled because her hand trembled, and the match burned close to her fingers before she found the tip.
She turned up the flame until it sang, and glanced about her fearfully, with one hand on her bruised cheek and her underlip caught in by her teeth.
Mr. Trimp's room was as expressive as a lady's glove still warm from her hand. He might have slipped out of it and let it lie crumpled, but in his own image.
The fumes of bay-rum and stale beer struggled for supremacy. The center-table, with a sickening litter of empty bottles and dead ashes, was dreary as cold mutton in its grease, or a woman's painted face at crack o' dawn, or the moment when the flavor of love becomes as tansy.
A red-satin slipper, an unhygienic drinking-goblet, which has leaked and slopped over full many a non-waterproof romance, lay on the floor, with its red run into many pinks and its rosette limp as a wad of paper. Goldie picked her careful way round it. Fear and nausea and sickness at the heart made her dizzy.
The dresser, with its wavy mirror, was strewn with her husband's neckties; an uncorked bottle of bay-rum gave out its last faint fumes.
She opened the first long drawer with a quivering intake of breath and pulled out a shirt-waist, another, and yet another, and a coarse white petticoat with a large-holed embroidery flounce. Then she dragged a suit-case, which was wavy like the mirror, through the blur of her tears, out from under the bed; and while she fumbled with the lock the door behind her opened, and her heart rose in her throat with the sudden velocity of an express elevator shooting up a ten-story shaft.
In the dresser mirror, and without turning her head or gaining her feet, she looked into the eyes of her husband.
"Pussy-cat!" he said, and came toward her with his teeth flashing like Carrara marble in sunlight.
She sprang to her feet and backed against the dresser.
"Don't! Don't you come near me!"
"You don't mean that, Goldie."
She shivered in her scorn.
"Don't you come near me! I came--to get my things."
"Oh!" he said, and tossed his hat on the bed and peeled off his coat. "Help yourself, kiddo. Go as far as you like."
She fell to tearing at the contents of her drawer without discrimination, cramming them into her bag and breathing furiously, like a hare in the torture of the chase. The color sprang out in her cheeks, and her eyes took fire.
Her husband threw himself, in his shirt-sleeves and waistcoat, across the bed and watched her idly. Only her fumbling movements and the sing of the too-high gas broke the silence. He rose, lowered the flame, and lay down again.
Her little box of poor trinkets spilled its contents as she packed it; her hair-brush fell from her trembling fingers and clattered to the floor.
"Can I help you, Goldie-eyes?"
Silence. He coughed rather deep in his chest, and she almost brushed his hand as she passed to the clothes wardrobe. He reached out and caught her wrist.
"Now, Goldie, you--"
"Don't--don't you touch me! Let go!"
He drew her down to the bed beside him.
"Can't you give a fellow another chance, baby? Can't you?" She tugged for her freedom, but his clasp was tight as steel and tender as love. "Can't you, baby?"
"You!" she said, kicking at the sloppy satin slipper at her feet, as if it were a loathsome thing that crawled. "I--I don't ever want to see you again, you--you--"
"You drove me to it, pussy; honest you did!"
"You didn't need no driving. You take to it like a fish to water--nobody can drive you. You just ain't--no--good!"
"You drove me to it. When you quit I just went crazy mad. I kicked the skylight--I tore things wide open. I was that sore for you--honest, baby!"
"I've heard that line of talk before. I ain't forgot the night at Hinkey's. I ain't forgot nothing. You or horses can't hold me here!" She wrenched at her wrists.
"I got a job yesterday, baby. Bill made good. Eighty dollars, honey! Me and Cutty are quits for good. Ain't that something--now, ain't it?"
"Let me go!"
"Pussy-cat!"
"Let me go, I say!"
He coughed and turned on his side toward her.
"You don't mean it."
"I do! I do! Let go! Let go!"
She tore herself free and darted to the wardrobe door. He closed his eyes and his lashes lay low on his cheeks.
"Before you go, Goldie, where's the antiphlogistin? I got a chest on me like an ice-wagon."
"Sure, you have. That's the only time you ever show up before crack of dawn."
He reached out and touched her wrist.
"I'm hot, ain't I?"
She placed a reluctant hand on his brow.
"Fever?"
"It ain't nothing much. I'll be all right."
"It's just one of your spells. Stay in bed a couple of days, and you'll soon be ready for another jamboree!"
"Don't fuss at me, baby."
"It's in the wash-stand drawer in a little tin can. Don't make the plaster too hot."
"Sure, I won't. I'll get along all righty."
She threw a shabby cloth skirt over her arm and a pressed-plush coat that was gray at the elbows and frayed at the hem. He reached out for the dangling empty sleeve as she passed.
"You was married in that coat, wasn't you, hon?"
"Yes," she said, and her lips curled like burning paper; "I was married in that coat."
"Goldie-eyes, you know I can't get along without my petsie; you know it. There ain't no one can hold a candle to you, baby!"
"Yes, yes!"
"There ain't! I wish I was feelin' well enough to tell you how sorry, baby--how sorry a fellow like me can get. I just wish it, baby--baby--"
She surrendered like a reed to the curve of a scythe and crumpled in a contortional heap beside the bed.
"You--you always get me!"
He gathered her up and laid her head backward on his shoulder, so that her face was foreshortened and close to his.
"Goldie-eyes," he said, "I'll make it up to you! I'll make it up to you!" And he made a motion as though to kiss her where the curls lay on her face, but drew back as if sickened.
"Good God!" he said. "Poor little baby!"
Quick as a throb of a heart she turned her left cheek, smooth as a lily petal, to his lips.
"It's all right, Harry!" she said, in a voice that was tight. "I'm crazy, I guess; but, gee, it's great to be crazy!"
"I'll make it up to you, baby. See if I don't! I'll make it up to you."
She kissed him, and his lips were hot and dry.
"Lemme fix your plaster, dearie; you got one of your colds."
"Don't get it too hot, hon."
"Gee! Lemme straighten up. Say, ain't you a messer, though! Look at this here wash-stand and those neckties! Ain't you a messer, though, dearie!"
She crammed the ties into a dresser drawer, dragged a chair into place, removed a small tin can from the wash-stand drawer, hung her hat and jacket on their peg, and lowered the shade.
MARKED DOWN
Along with radium, parcels post, wireless telegraphy, and orchestral church music came tight skirts and the hipless movement.
Adolph Katzenstein placed his figurative ear to the ground, heard the stealthy whisper of soft messalines and clinging charmeuse, and sold out the Empire Shirt-waist Company for twenty-five hundred dollars at a slight loss.
Five years later the Katzenstein Neat-Fit Petticoat was flaunted in the red and white electric lights in the lightest part of Broadway, and the figure of an ecstatic girl in an elastic-top, charmeuse-ruffled petticoat had become as much of an epic in street-car advertising as the flakiest breakfast food or the safest safety razor.
Then the Katzensteins moved from a simplex to a complex apartment, furnished the dining-room in Flemish oak and the bedroom in white mahogany; Mrs. Katzenstein telephoned to her fancy grocer's for artichokes instead of buying cabbages from the street-vender, and Mr. Katzenstein walked with the four fingers of each hand thrust into the distended front pockets of his trousers.
On the first Tuesday of each month Mrs. Katzenstein entertained at whist--an antediluvian survival of a bridgeless era.
At eight o'clock in the morning of one of these first Tuesdays she entered her daughter's white-mahogany bedroom, raised the shades with a clatter, and drew back the curtains.
"Birdie, get up! It's late, and we got house-cleaning this morning. Papa's been gone already an hour."
The pink-and-white flowered comforter on the bed stirred, and two plump arms, with frills of lace falling backward, raised up like sturdy monoliths in the stretch that accompanies a yawn.
"Aw--yaw--yaw--mamma! Can't you let a girl sleep after she's been up late? Tell Tillie she should begin her sweeping in the hall."
"I should know what time you got home last night. You sneak in like you was afraid it would give me some pleasure to wake up and hear about it! Who was there? What did Marcus have to say?"
"Aw, mamma, let me sleep--can't you? I'll get up in a minute."
"So close-mouthed she is--goes to the party with a grand boy like Marcus and comes home like she was muzzled! Nothing to say! If I was out with a young man so often I could talk."
"Please, mamma, pull down the shade."
"'Please, mamma, pull down the shade!'" mimicked Mrs. Katzenstein, in a high falsetto. "After I rush round all day yesterday for the pink wreath for her hair, that's what I hear the next morning--that's the thanks I get!"