"The kind I have known would not let me. They're just as hateful now--I mean the stuffy dolls of the stage--just as hateful, calling me 'dear' and 'love' and saying, 'How tremendous you are, Selma Cross!....' Listen, it is only a little while ago that the same women used to ask me to walk on Broadway with them--to use me as a foil for their baby faces! Oh, women are horrible--dusty shavings inside--and men are of the same family." "You poor, dear unfortunate--not to know the really wonderful kind! You are worn to the bone from winning your victory, but when you're rested, you'll be able to see the beautiful--clearly." "One only knows as far as one can see." This sentence was a shock to Paula's intelligence. It was spoken without consciousness of the meaning which drove so deep into the other's mind. It suggested a mind dependent altogether upon physical eyes. Paula refused to believe that this was the key to the whole matter. "They have been so cruel to me--those female things which bloom a year," Selma Cross continued. "Flesh-flowers! They harried me to martyrdom. I had to hate them, because I was forced to be one with them--I, a big savage, dreaming unutterable things. It's all so close yet, I haven't come to pity them.... Maybe you can tell me what good they are--what they mean in the world--the shallow, brainless things who make the stage full! They are in factories, too, everywhere--daughters of the coolies and peasants of Europe--only worse over here because their fathers have lost their low fixed place in society, and are all mixed in their dim, brute minds. They have no one to rule them. You will see a family of dirty, frightened, low-minded children--the eldest, say a girl of fifteen. A dog or a cat with a good home is rich beside them. Take this eldest girl of a brood--with all the filth of foreign New York in and about her. She is fifteen and ready for the streets. It is the year of her miracle. I've seen it a score of times. You miss her a few months and she appears again at work somewhere--her face decently clean, her eyes clear, a bit of bright ribbon and a gown wrung somewhere from the beds of torture. It is her brief bloom--so horrid to look at when you know what it means. All the fifteen years of squalor, evil, and low-mindedness for this one year--a bloom-girl out of the dirt! And the next, she has fallen back, unwashed, high-voiced, hardening, stiffening,--a babe at her breast, dull hell in her heart. All her living before and to come--for that one bloom year. Maybe you can tell me what the big purpose of it all is. Earth uses them quite as ruthlessly as any weed or flower--gives them a year to bloom, not for beauty, but that more crude seeds may be scattered. Perpetuate! Flowers bloom to catch a bug--such girls, to catch a man--perpetuate--oh God, what for? And these things have laughed at me in the chorus, called me 'Crazy Sal,' because I spoke of things they never dreamed."