“Thanks!” said Mary Casey. “Well--you know--after you’ve fed a man when he’s hungry, you get to sort of think you own him. You feel like you’re his mother, you might say. I got to feeling that way about Teddy. I felt like he was mine. I don’t suppose I thought about marrying; I knew he couldn’t support me. But I never thought about anything that I’d be doing, way off in life, when we were older, without thinking about him being right there with me. You know what I mean? I just didn’t think we’d ever be anywhere without the other one being there, too. Not that he said anything much, only--‘I’m awful fond of you, kid!’ But I didn’t mind. I was fool happy, dancing afternoons with all sorts of men, and all the time thinking that pretty soon Teddy’d be coming in by the doorkeeper, and looking around for me--and then sit in the darkish restaurant eating part of my dinner--though it did used to leave me pretty hungry, for the dinner the management gave us wasn’t much on size. Some of the girls used to kick about those dinners; you’re awful hungry after you’ve been dragged around the floor for hours and hours by heavy-footed hicks. But the management laughed at the complaints; said the girls would keep their figures if they didn’t eat too much. I’ll say I kept mine! I was ’most starved every night when I got to bed. My stomach used to feel as if it was sticking to my backbone. I was on the floor every dance. I was popular with the men who came there. It isn’t that I’m pretty; I’m not. And so they look again to see what the deuce I am. And that gets a man’s goat--when he can’t make out what he likes about a girl. “Anyhow, if I’d ever been pretty I’d have lost it by now. I’ve been so darned careful; and when a girl’s careful, and suspects everybody, she gets hard and mean looking. The other girls--those that aren’t careful--get hard and tough. It all comes to the same thing; they look the same way in the face. Women can’t look soft in the face unless they’re taken care of by their people.” “When you are talking this way, you don’t look hard,” interrupted Kirwin. “That’s because it’s a comfort to sit here and say everything that comes into my head. Most times, when I’m across a table from a man, I have to think before I open my mouth: ‘Will this give him a handle?’ And so I just say: ‘Oh! Isn’t this a lovely floor?’ And: ‘My! But you are a dandy dancer!’ When like as not he’s stepped all over me.” “Men are brutes! They even step on the ladies’ toes!” the laughing Angier remarked.