Lora’s hands suddenly came down and her face shot up; it was flushed and marks showed where her fingers had pressed, but there was no trace of tears.
“Oh, shut up!” she flung at him.
She reached out with her foot, got the toe of her slipper behind the folds of the five-dollar bill and shoved it across the carpet towards him until it touched his shoe.
“I don’t want it, it isn’t worth the fuss,” she said. “It’s all right as far as I’m concerned if you take money from me, I don’t mind, but you might have the decency not to talk about it.”
He reached down for the bill, smoothed and folded it as before, and returned it to his pocket. Lora watched him.
“I wonder,” he remarked, “whether you have any idea what you mean when you say decency.”
“Maybe I mean decency. It’s a plain word.”
“Not at all plain. Did you ever hear of sex? If I take money from a man without intending to repay it, it may not even be dishonest; many men have done it whose statues are in our public parks and buildings. But if I take it from a woman we don’t stop at dishonest; it becomes, as we say, positively indecent. Now why? Obviously because man wants a woman’s body, particularly that portion of it which he customarily uses, constantly available at a minimum cost of time and effort; the simplest way out of that is to own a woman. But if he owns her he must feed her; more, he can’t expect to be permitted to own and feed one unless other men will do the same. In defense of this manufactured right — masquerading as a duty — he is led inevitably to the corollary: any man who instead of owning and feeding a woman permits himself to be fed by one is unmanly. Indecent. See how smoothly it works? Imagine the system functioning on an isolated island where there are only ten men and ten women and you’ll see how dangerous the exception would be to the institution. But here’s where the real joke comes in: women, completely bamboozled by man’s superior capacity to twist words, have become more ardent supporters of his system than man himself. It was you, a woman, and by no means an inferior specimen, quite the contrary, who just now spoke of decency. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
“It’s very complicated,” said Lora. She was thinking: anyway I’m not an inferior specimen, that’s something, that’s exciting, that is.
“So if I take money from you, and even go to the unheard of extreme of talking about it,” he went on, “it’s really a compliment. At least it’s a compliment to your sex, for to be perfectly honest about it I was never able to comprehend how it was possible for a man to want to own and feed a woman till I met you.”
“Oh,” said Lora.
“I don’t mean the underlying economic and biological motives, I understand them of course; I mean the individual man and the individual woman. It has always seemed to me that a man who willingly — nay, eagerly — jumped into that pot was an emotional lunatic. I see now that it’s possible. Not that I’d do it, but it’s conceivable. I can easily believe that a man might regard you as something much more serious than a brief and pleasant episode. The first evening I saw you, out at that bridge den, I thought to myself, ha, here’s a nice little posy for the buttonhole, and then after I got you into a taxi all I did was give you a sermon on street-cars.”
He stopped to light a cigarette. Lora was silent, and when he offered one to her she shook her head. Now, she supposed, thus interrupted, he would jump back to economic and biological motives. But after he had taken a puff or two, inhaled, and expelled the grey smoke through his mouth and nose simultaneously, what he said was:
“You know, I’ve got a confession to make that I’m ashamed of. I’d like to give you something.
“It’s the first time I’ve ever felt that way,” he went on, as she said nothing. “I’ve given people things, but only as a gesture of contempt or indifference. This is different, and I don’t like it. Just last evening I caught myself looking in the window of a confectioner’s shop thinking it would be nice to take you a box of candy. Then I remembered you work in a candy factory, so flowers or a book would be better.”
“I would have loved flowers.”
“Sure you would. Why not? Anybody would. You notice I didn’t get them, but even that doesn’t make me entirely easy, for I was influenced by the consideration that the money in my pocket had come from you and that it would be idiotic to present you with flowers bought with your own money. That is, not your own, but it had been. By god, if I catch myself going around like a brainless ass giving flowers to girls—”
“I’m not girls.”
“Aha!” She was startled, he leaped to his feet so suddenly and unexpectedly. “That’s what I’ve been looking for! That’s the signal, is it? No, you don’t, it won’t work! I’ve still got my head on my shoulders, thank god! What signal? The signal for going home — you ought to see it. The signal for walking the sight of you out of my eyes! The wind will blow it out!”
