Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/381

 Corinne, and Janine, in their various remarks, confirm that experience, and Tessie couldn't possibly be franker about it.

Perhaps women can be prostitutes because of their adjustability to anything as long as men will love them. I am guessing at this, but though men too make love to women they care nothing about, they have to feel some sexual necessity.

Is one reason why men novelists and dramatists are fascinated by prostitutes that the latter can simulate necessity at any time?

And then this aspect of it—a Nana or Sadie Thompson or Anna Christie, who becomes the hero's redeemed personal property, after being "possessed" by so many men, his act of love "purifying" the prostitute. Apparently a man doesn't have to be purified no matter how active he has been. Or is it that he is purified by being so active!—But why this fascination in the highest to lowest forms of expression—literature to burlesque houses—with woman depicted primarily as a prostitute? In writing of Lucy, one would have to consider this.

"Let it ring. I don't want to hear any more trouble tonight," Lucy said to Mae of the telephone but, as the ringing persisted, said, "Maybe I'd better answer."

"Something wrong?" Mae asked, seeing her frown as she returned from the bedroom.

"It was a woman I don't like—Mrs. Cornwallis. She's giving a goodbye surprise party for Nino three weeks from Saturday. I suppose I'll have to go."

"That will be nice. Isn't she that society woman who gave that ball there were pictures of in the rotogravure section?"

"Yes. She isn't society."

"She must be to have all those important people come and to have friends in royalty like the Marqués."

"Nobility—not royalty," Lucy corrected affectionately, thinking how anxious Mother was for her to be friends with those she thought of as the "best people," probably because the years of poverty had not been the fun to Mother they had seemed to her as a child and even now. Maybe those days of scraps of food and cockroachy rooms were a bogeyman that made Mother cling to the belief that people with society names were magicians who would protect her Pussy. Funny what a child Mother is, believing rich people would be their security! If Nino did propose could she disappoint Mother again? Rh