New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Women white collar workers -- Fiction
In ten minutes a van-load of sheepish trippers from the Middle West
filed into the restaurant and tried to act as though they were used to
cocktails. Una was delighted when she saw them secretly peering at Phil
and herself; she put one hand on her thigh and one on the table, leaned
forward and tried to look tough, while Phil pretended to be quarreling
with her, and the trippers' simple souls were enthralled by this glimpse
of two criminals. Una really enjoyed the acting; for a moment Phil was
her companion in play; and when the trippers had gone rustling out to
view other haunts of vice she smiled at Phil unrestrainedly.
Instantly he took advantage of her smile, of their companionship.
He was really as simple-hearted as the trippers in his tactics.
She had been drinking ginger-ale. He urged her now to "have a real
drink." He muttered confidentially: "Have a nip of sherry or a New
Orleans fizz or a Bronx. That'll put heart into you. Not enough to
affect you a-tall, but just enough to cheer up on. Then we'll go to a
dance and really have a time. Gee! poor kid, you don't get any fun."
"No, no, I _never_ touch it," she said, and she believed it, forgetting
the claret she had drunk with Walter Babson.
She felt unsafe.
He laughed at her; assured her from his medical experience that "lots of
women need a little tonic," and boisterously ordered a glass of sherry
for her.
She merely sipped it. She wanted to escape. All their momentary
frankness of association was gone. She feared him; she hated the
complaisant waiter who brought her the drink; the fat proprietor who
would take his pieces of silver, though they were the price of her soul;
the policeman on the pavement, who would never think of protecting her;
and the whole hideous city which benignly profited by saloons. She
watched another couple down at the end of the room--an obese man and a
young, pretty girl, who was hysterically drunk. Not because she had
attended the Women's Christian Temperance Union at Panama and heard them
condemn "the demon rum," but because the sickish smell of the alcohol
was all about her now, she suddenly turned into a crusader. She sprang
up, seized her gloves, snapped, "I will not touch the stuff." She
marched down the room, out of the restaurant and away, not once looking
back at Phil.
In about fifteen seconds she had a humorous picture of Phil trying to
rush after her, but stopped by the waiter to pay his check. She began to
wonder if she hadn't been slightly ridiculous in attempting to slay
Demon Rum by careering down the restaurant. But "I don't care!" she
said, stoutly. "I'm glad I took a stand instead of just rambling along
and wondering what it was all about, the way I did with Walter."
Phil caught up to her and instantly began to complain. "Say, you
certainly made a sight out of yourself--and out of me--leaving me
sitting there with the waiter laughing his boob head off at me. Lord!
I'll never dare go near the place again."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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