“You can hardly expect him to be hilarious about it.”
The girl scowled and said disagreeably:
“I can expect anything I want. And he’s got no right to talk to me that way. He doesn’t own me. Maybe he thinks he does, but I’ll show him different.” She emptied her glass, banged it on the table, and twisted around in her chair to face me. “Is that on the level about your having ten thousand dollars of Elihu Willsson’s money to use cleaning up the city?”
“Yeah.”
Her bloodshot eyes glistened hungrily.
“And if I help you will I get some of the ten—?”
“You can’t do that, Dinah.” Rolff’s voice was thick, but gently firm, as if he were talking to a child. “That would be utterly filthy.”
The girl turned her face slowly toward him. Her mouth took on the look it had worn while talking to Thaler.
“I am going to do it,” she said. “That makes me utterly filthy, does it?”
He didn’t say anything, didn’t look up from the bottle. Her face got red, hard, cruel. Her voice was soft, cooing:
“It’s just too bad that a gentleman of your purity, even if he is a bit consumptive, has to associate with a filthy bum like me.”
“That can be remedied,” he said slowly, getting up. He was laudanumed to the scalp.
Dinah Brand jumped out of her chair and ran around the table to him. He looked at her with blank dopey eyes. She put her face close to his and demanded: