Nature doesn't care how she uses us. It's the next generation concerns
her. She has to drug us or we couldn't endure. We're drugged on
respectability. On a few of us the drug won't react. I'm one. Let me go,
Albert. To Chicago. I was there once with mamma and papa to the Rope and
Hemp Manufacturers' Convention. Or, better still, New York. That's the
field for my kind of work. Many a girl with less voice than I has gotten
on there. Albert, won't you let me go?"
He was like nothing so much as a cornered bull, trying to bash his
bewildered head through the impenetrable wall of things. Little red
shreds had come out in the white of his eyes; he was sweating coarsely
and feeling the corners of his mouth with his tongue.
"You won't ruin my name--you won't ruin my name."
"I'll take the blame. I'll love taking it. You'll have a clean case of
desertion--"
Suddenly he took a step toward her with the threat of a roar in his
voice, and again she found relief in the rising velocity of his anger
and practically thrust herself in the hope of a blow.
"What are you that I am married to," he cried, "a she-devil? What have
I got to do? Treat you like one? Huh? Huh?"
He stopped just short of her, the upper half of his body thrust backward
from restraining his impulse to lunge, his face distorted and quivering
down at her.
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