Nevertheless, she was scrupulous in her public avoidance of the girl and, illogically, in a moment of unreasoning annoyance she would attack Eliza:
“Why do you keep such people in your house, mama? Every one in town knows about her. Your place is getting the reputation of a regular chippyhouse all over town.”
Eliza pursed her lips angrily:
“I don’t pay any attention to them,” she said. “I consider myself as good as any one. I hold my head up, and I expect every one else to do likewise. You don’t catch me associating with them.”
It was part of her protective mechanism. She pretended to be proudly oblivious to any disagreeable circumstance which brought her in money. As a result, by that curious impalpable advertisement which exists among easy women, Dixieland became known to them— they floated casually in—the semi-public, clandestine prostitutes of a tourist town.
Helen had drifted apart from most of her friends of high school days—the hard-working plain-faced Genevieve Pratt, daughter of a schoolmaster, “Teeney” Duncan, Gertrude Brown. Her companions now were livelier, if somewhat more vulgar, young women—Grace Deshaye, a plumber’s daughter, an opulent blonde; Pearl Hines, daughter of a Baptist saddlemaker: she was heavy of body and face, but she had a powerful rag-time singing voice.
Her closest companion, however, was a girl whose name was Nan Gudger: she was a brisk, slender, vital girl, with a waist so tightly corsetted that a man’s hands might go around it. She was the trusted, accurate, infallible bookkeeper of a grocery store. She contributed largely to the support of her family—a mother whom Eugene looked upon with sick flesh, because of the heavy goitre that sagged from her loose neck; a crippled sister who moved about the house by means of crutches and the propulsive strength of her powerful shoulders; and two brothers, hulking young thugs of twenty and eighteen years, who always bore upon their charmed bodies fresh knife-wounds, blue lumps and swellings, and other marks of their fights in poolroom and brothel. They lived in a two-story shack of rickety lumber on
