LITMIR.BIZ

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afternoon at six, when Dulcie was sticking her hat-pin within an eighth of an inch of her medulla oblongata[164], she said to her chum, Sadie – the girl that waits on you with her left side:

      “Say, Sade, I made a date for dinner this evening with Piggy.”

      “You never did!” exclaimed Sadie admiringly. “Well, ain’t you the lucky one? Piggy’s an awful swell; and he always takes a girl to swell places. He took Blanche up to the Hoffman House one evening, where they have swell music, and you see a lot of swells. You’ll have a swell time, Dulce.”

      Dulcie hurried homeward. Her eyes were shining, and her cheeks showed the delicate pink of life’s – real life’s – approaching dawn. It was Friday; and she had fifty cents left of her last week’s wages.

      The streets were filled with the rush-hour floods of people. The electric lights of Broadway were glowing – calling moths from miles, from leagues, from hundreds of leagues out of darkness around to come in and attend the singeing school. Men in accurate clothes, with faces like those carved on cherry stones by the old salts in sailors’ homes, turned and stared at Dulcie as she sped, unheeding, past them. Manhattan, the night-blooming cereus, was beginning to unfold its dead-white, heavy-odoured petals.

      Dulcie stopped in a store where goods were cheap and bought an imitation lace collar with her fifty cents. That money was to have been spent otherwise – fifteen cents for supper, ten cents for breakfast, ten cents for lunch. Another dime was to be added to her small store of savings; and five cents was to be squandered for licorice drops – the kind that made your cheek look like the toothache, and last as long. The licorice was an extravagance – almost a carouse – but what is life without pleasures?

      Dulcie lived in a furnished room. There is this difference between a furnished room and a boarding-house. In a furnished room, other people do not know it when you go hungry.

      Dulcie went up to her room – the third floor back in a West Side brownstone-front. She lit the gas. Scientists tell us that the diamond is the hardest substance known. Their mistake. Landladies know of a compound beside which the diamond is as putty. They pack it in the tips of gas-burners; and one may stand on a chair and dig at it in vain until one’s fingers are pink and bruised. A hairpin will not remove it; therefore let us call it immovable.

      So Dulcie lit the gas. In its one-fourth-candlepower glow we will observe the room.

      Couch-bed, dresser, table, washstand, chair – of this much the landlady was guilty. The rest was Dulcie’s. On the dresser were her treasures – a gilt china vase presented to her by Sadie, a calendar issued by a pickle works, a book on the divination of dreams, some rice powder in a glass dish, and a cluster of artificial cherries tied with a pink ribbon.

      Against the wrinkly mirror stood pictures of General Kitchener[165], William Muldoon[166], the Duchess of Marlborough[167], and Benvenuto Cellini. Against one wall was a plaster of Paris plaque of an O’Callahan in a Roman helmet. Near it was a violent oleograph[168] of a lemon-coloured child assaulting an inflammatory butterfly. This was Dulcie’s final judgment in art; but it had never been upset. Her rest had never been disturbed by whispers of stolen copes; no critic had elevated his eyebrows at her infantile entomologist.

      Piggy was to call for her at seven. While she swiftly makes ready, let us discreetly face the other way and gossip.

      For the room, Dulcie paid two dollars per week. On week-days her breakfast cost ten cents; she made coffee and cooked an egg over the gaslight while she was dressing. On Sunday mornings she feasted royally on veal chops and pineapple fritters at “Billy’s” restaurant, at a cost of twenty-five cents – and tipped the waitress ten cents. New York presents so many temptations for one to run into extravagance. She had her lunches in the department-store restaurant at a cost of sixty cents for the week; dinners were $1.05. The evening papers – show me a New Yorker going without his daily paper! – came to six cents; and two Sunday papers – one for the personal column and the other to read – were ten cents. The total amounts to $4.76. Now, one has to buy clothes, and —

      I give it up. I hear of wonderful bargains in fabrics, and of miracles performed with needle and thread; but I am in doubt. I hold my pen poised in vain when I would add to Dulcie’s life some of those joys that belong to woman by virtue of all the unwritten, sacred, natural, inactive ordinances of the equity of heaven. Twice she had been to Coney Island and had ridden the hobby-horses. ’Tis a weary thing to count your pleasures by summers instead of by hours.

      Piggy needs but a word. When the girls named him, an undeserving stigma was cast upon the noble family of swine. The words-of-three-letters lesson in the old blue spelling book begins with Piggy’s biography. He was fat; he had the soul of a rat, the habits of a bat, and the magnanimity of a cat… He wore expensive clothes; and was a connoisseur in starvation. He could look at a shop-girl and tell you to an hour how long it had been since she had eaten anything more nourishing than marshmallows and tea. He hung about the shopping districts, and prowled around in department stores with his invitations to dinner. Men who escort dogs upon the streets at the end of a string look down upon him. He is a type; I can dwell upon him no longer; my pen is not the kind intended for him; I am no carpenter.

      At ten minutes to seven Dulcie was ready. She looked at herself in the wrinkly mirror. The reflection was satisfactory. The dark blue dress, fitting without a wrinkle, the hat with its jaunty black feather, the but-slightly-soiled gloves – all representing self-denial, even of food itself – were vastly becoming.

      Dulcie forgot everything else for a moment except that she was beautiful, and that life was about to lift a corner of its mysterious veil for her to observe its wonders. No gentleman had ever asked her out before. Now she was going for a brief moment into the glitter and exalted show.

      The girls said that Piggy was a “spender.” There would be a grand dinner, and music, and splendidly dressed ladies to look at, and things to eat that strangely twisted the girls’ jaws when they tried to tell about them. No doubt she would be asked out again. There was a blue pongee suit in a window that she knew – by saving twenty cents a week instead of ten, in – let’s see – Oh, it would run into years! But there was a second-hand store in Seventh Avenue where —

      Somebody knocked at the door. Dulcie opened it. The landlady stood there with a spurious smile, sniffing for cooking by stolen gas.

      “A gentleman’s downstairs to see you,” she said. “Name is Mr. Wiggins.”

      By such epithet was Piggy known to unfortunate ones who had to take him seriously.

      Dulcie turned to the dresser to get her handkerchief; and then she stopped still, and bit her underlip hard. While looking in her mirror she had seen fairyland and herself, a princess, just awakening from a long slumber. She had forgotten one that was watching her with sad, beautiful, stern eyes – the only one there was to approve or condemn what she did. Straight and slender and tall, with a look of sorrowful reproach on his handsome, melancholy face, General Kitchener fixed his wonderful eyes on her out of his gilt photograph frame on the dresser.

      Dulcie turned like an automatic doll to the landlady.

      “Tell him I can’t go,” she said dully. “Tell him I’m sick, or something. Tell him I’m not going out.”

      After the door was closed and locked, Dulcie fell upon her bed, crushing her black tip, and cried for ten minutes. General Kitchener was her only friend. He was Dulcie’s ideal of a gallant

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