She stared at him, as if among all of life's possibilities this was one she had never held as conceivable.
"No kidding?" she whispered.
"No kidding."
She whirled around and ran like a streak to the door of the employees1 quarters, forgetting her counter, her duties and all feminine concern about never showing eagerness in accepting a man's invitation.
He stood looking after her for a moment, his eyes narrowed. He did not name to himself the nature of his own feeling—never to identify his emotions was the only steadfast rule of his life; he merely felt it—and this particular feeling was pleasurable, which was the only identification he cared to know. But the feeling was the product of a thought he would not utter. He had often met girls of the lower classes, who had put on a brash little act, pretending to look up to him, spilling crude flattery for an obvious purpose; he had neither liked nor resented them; he had found a bored amusement in their company and he had granted them the status of his equals in a game he considered natural to both players involved. This girl was different. The unuttered words in his mind were: The damn little fool means it.
That he waited for her impatiently, when he stood in the rain on the sidewalk, that she was the one person he needed tonight, did not disturb him or strike him as a contradiction. He did not name the nature of his need. The unnamed and the unuttered could not clash into a contradiction.
When she came out, he noted the peculiar combination of her shyness and of her head held high. She wore an ugly raincoat, made worse by a gob of cheap jewelry on the lapel, and a small hat of plush flowers planted defiantly among her curls. Strangely, the lift of her head made the apparel seem attractive; it stressed how well she wore even the things she wore.
"Want to come to my place and have a drink with me?" he asked.
She nodded silently, solemnly, as if not trusting herself to find the right words of acceptance. Then she said, not looking at him, as if stating it to herself, "You didn't want to see anybody tonight, but you want o see me. . . " He had never heard so solemn a tone of pride in anyone's voice.
She was silent, when she sat beside him in the taxicab. She looked up at the skyscrapers they passed. After a while, she said, "I heard that things like this happened in New York, but I never thought they'd happen to me."
"Where do you come from?"
"Buffalo."
"Got any family?"
She hesitated. "I guess so. In Buffalo."
"What do you mean, you guess so?"
"I walked out on them."
"Why?"
"I thought that if I ever was to amount to anything, I had to get away from them, clean away."
"Why? What happened?"
"Nothing happened. And nothing was ever going to happen. That's what I couldn't stand."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, they . . . well, I guess I ought to tell you the truth, Mr. Taggart. My old man's never been any good, and Ma didn't care whether he was or not, and I got sick of it always turning out that I was the only one of the seven of us that kept a job, and the rest of them always being out of luck, one way or another. I thought if I didn't get out, it would get me—I'd rot all the way through, like the rest of them. So I bought a railroad ticket one day and left. Didn't say good-bye. They didn't even know I was going." She gave a soft, startled little laugh at a sudden thought. "Mr. Taggart," she said, "it was a Taggart train."
"When did you come here?"
"Six months ago."
"And you're all alone?"
"Yes," she said happily.
"What was it you wanted to do?"
"Well, you know—make something of myself, get somewhere."
"Where?"
"Oh, I don't know, but . . . but people do things in the world. 1 saw pictures of New York and I thought"—she pointed at the giant buildings beyond the streaks of rain on the cab window—"I thought, somebody built those buildings—he didn't just sit and whine that the kitchen was filthy and the roof leaking and the plumbing clogged and it's a goddamn world and . . . Mr. Taggart"—she jerked her head in a shudder and looked straight at him—"we were stinking poor and not giving a damn about it. That's what I couldn't take—that they didn't really give a damn. Not enough to lift a finger. Not enough to empty the garbage pail. And the woman next door saying it was my duty to help them, saying it made no difference what became of me or of her or of any of us, because what could anybody do anyway!" Beyond the bright look of her eyes, he saw something within her that was hurt and hard.
"I don't want to talk about them," she said. "Not with you. This—my meeting you, I mean—that's what they couldn't have. That's what I'm not going to share with them. It's mine, not theirs."
"How old are you?" he asked.
"Nineteen."
