Page:Arthur Stringer - The Hand of Peril.djvu/84

 "To preach about what?" she still inquired. He realised that she still shrank back from those frontiers of intimacy which he seemed bound to cross.

"About this life you're leading," he said. "About what it will lead to, and what it will do to you."

"Is painting on ivory so fatal?" she asked. But her smile was almost pitiful.

"It's crime that's fatal," cried Kestner. "You can't succeed, neither you nor your father nor Morello. You're getting protection of a kind at the present moment. But it's a poor kind, and it can't last! You're facing the wrong way. You'll only go down, and still farther down, and at every step you'll have meaner and dirtier work to do. You'll go down until you're nothing but a slum-worker leading the life of a street-cat. You'll shut yourself off from every decent influence that can come into a woman's life. And even though you should slip through the hands of the law—and you can't do that—month by month and year by year you'll fall lower and lower, lying and cheating and flimflamming and bunco-steering and scurrying from one warren to another."

"Wait," she said, white to the lips. But Kestner did not choose to wait.

"You won't come in contact with one man you can respect or trust. But crooked as they are, the time will come when you'll have to turn to them for protection. And if they give you that, they'll expect their price for it. And they'll get their price, in the end. Oh, believe me, I've seen the woman adventurer. I've followed their careers, by the hundred—not