“Women” would have been bad enough, but he would have tired of them and come back. There’d be no coming back from this girl of twenty-one, clever and hard of mind and soft and pink of body, with the first taste of what money could do fresh in her mouth. Men didn’t come back from the Schoonmaker women. Behind Lorraine, with her sleek black pomaded hair, her short tight pussy-willow taffeta one piece gown, her chiffon stockings and high-heeled satin pumps with rhinestone buckles, her vanity case almost as big as a traveling bag, her jeweled wrist watch and swinging bead girdle, Rosie saw Ally Schoonmaker, her older sister, who had married Timothy Bund practically on his death-bed for his house and his shares in the North Star Mine. And behind Ally, up the ladder of the years a rung or two, Dora Schoonmaker, breaking up the Watson home when Mike Watson’s mine began to pay, and somehow juggling him into a divorce from the woman who had seen him through the lean grim years of penury and into marriage with her and then carrying him off East. And Effie, the oldest of the four, who had run away with Perce Williams, nearly two decades her junior, when he came into his father’s money, and held him grimly to her side ever since. Yes, and even Bertha Schoonmaker, the mother, with her wig and her dirty chiffon blouses and her painted cheeks and brown teeth and pink-lined hats with floating pink veils, playing the man-game still, at sixty-four. Their lean, rapacious Schoonmaker hands were all alike. If Lorraine took Jim, she’d take him to keep. At the altar. For very definite financial ends of her own. The tacit bargain between Long Jim and Rosie had never got itself into words; they hadn’t felt the need of them. He had pulled her out of hell. The strength of her allegiance to him couldn’t be increased by the mere saying of words, however sacred, or the giving of a ring. Marriage would have added nothing to her side of it. Nor, she had thought, to his. She wished now that she had it, but it had not occurred to her to wish it before. She had had something so much solider in poverty. Marriage might hold and it might not, but while he had been dependent upon her for his food and clothes, there had been no doubt. She went back to that over and over that night, seeing the placid years in the little house as very beautiful through a mist of pain. She had a feeling that, pulling at the almost forgotten cadences of the song, she had brought the past down about her ears. She felt the old trapped fatalistic despair and sick rage, without the old vigor. Something began banking up inside of her, steadily, relentlessly. She was terribly afraid of it. It seemed to her that it was a great bubble of black blood in her brain, and that when it burst-- She tried to keep from thinking to ease the strain on it, but her thoughts streamed out swiftly from oubliettes in obscure corners of her mind.