He had no money to give her: she did not want much—a coin or two at a time. It was, she said, not the money: it was the principle of the thing. He saw the justice of her argument.
“For,” said she, “if I wanted money, I wouldn’t fool with you. Somebody tries to get me to go out every day. One of the richest men in this town (old man Tyson) has been after me ever since I came. He’s offered me ten dollars if I’ll go out in his car with him. I don’t need your money. But you’ve got to give me something. I don’t care how little it is. I wouldn’t feel decent unless you did. I’m not one of your little Society Chippies that you see every day uptown. I’ve too much self-respect for that.”
So, in lieu of money, he gave her his medals as pledges.
“If you don’t redeem them,” said “Miss Brown,” “I’ll give them to my own son when I go home.”
“Have you a son?”
“Yes. He’s eighteen years old. He’s almost as tall as you are and twice as broad. All the girls are mad about him.”
He turned his head away sharply, whitening with a sense of nausea and horror, feeling in him an incestuous pollution.
“That’s enough, now,” said “Miss Brown” with authority. “Go to your room and get some sleep.”
But, unlike the first one in the tobacco town, she never called him “son.”
"Poor Butterfly, for her heart was break-king, Poor Butterfly, for she loved him so-o—"
Miss Irene Mallard changed the needle of the little phonograph in the sun-parlor, and reversed the well-worn record. Then as with stately emphasis, the opening measure of “Katinka” paced out, she waited for him, erect, smiling, slender, beautiful, with long lovely hands held up like wings to his embrace. She was teaching him to dance. Laura James had danced beautifully: it had maddened him to see her poised in the arms of a young man dancing. Now, clumsily, he moved off on a conscientious left foot, counting to himself. One, two, three, four! Irene Mallard
