She heard his low, vibrant voice go on. “I couldn’t bear to see you reach out your hands to those men there to-night. You touched _me_, once! For sake of that, I’m quitting my school.”
“It was only in a song!” she broke out “I’ve done that to a thousand men, I expect, and I didn’t care a cent for any one of them. It’s in the game—it’s part of my way of making a living. I’ve got to live.”
She laughed now with half a sob. “There can’t be in all the world any one man for me, I suppose—that’s the price we have to pay, who do this sort of thing.”
“Well, I don’t—I won’t—there isn’t——” replied Polly somewhat incoherently. “Listen, man! You’ve got to stop this! I can’t stand it. This means too much to you. You’ve taken it all in earnest when there wasn’t anything to it but a joke—a game—a business. And besides—I told you——”
“I told you—that—that I wasn’t good! Do you think that’s easy for me to say?”
“A woman as beautiful as you could not be anything but good.”
“Don’t! I can’t stand this—I told you once before I couldn’t stand it.”
“How can I help it? I told you a man is hard to manage.”
“You’re the hardest to manage I ever saw. What can I do with you? I want to be as good a scout as I can—I don’t really want to take money away from blind babies, nor love’n affection from idiot Johnnies. I don’t want you at all, and you mustn’t want anything to do with me at all. Do you suppose it’s easy for me to say that? Why don’t I let you make a fool of yourself the way they all do? Search me—I don’t know! Listen—have you ever doped this thing out all the way down the line? What’s in your mind—what would you like to do?—what would you like to have me do?”
“I never thought it out I—I don’t know. I don’t understand this at all. I don’t know why I came here to-night, to see you again.”
“Well, let’s suppose now that I was a single woman, and you were a single man. It isn’t true in your case, and we won’t say anything about mine. Suppose we were both free to do as we liked? How far do you suppose, my friend, that thirty-five cents would go in backing a theatrical company like this, that carries thirty-eight performers, its own sets and its own brass?”
Polly Pendleton, dependable always to do the unexpected, was not laughing now, but half sobbing, and wiping her eyes on the corner of her skirt.