Gourdain? No."

"Have you a crazy notion that your looks'll get you a better
husband? A big fortune or a title?"

"I haven't thought about a husband. Haven't I told you I wish
to be free?"

"But that doesn't mean anything."

"It might," said she absently.

"How?"

"I don't know. If one is always free--one is ready
for--whatever comes. Anyhow, I must be free--no matter what
it costs."

"I see you're bent on dropping back into the dirt I picked you
out of."

"Even that," she said. "I must be free."

"Haven't you any desire to be respectable--decent?"

"I guess not," confessed she. "What is there in that
direction for me?"

"A woman doesn't stay young and good-looking long."

"No." She smiled faintly. "But does she get old and ugly any
slower for being married?"

He rose and stood over her, looked smiling danger down at her.
She leaned back in her chair to meet his eyes without
constraint. "You're trying to play me a trick," said he.
"But you're not going to get away with the goods. I'm
astonished that you are so rotten ungrateful."

"Because I'm not for sale?"

"Queenie balking at selling herself," he jeered. "And what's
the least you ever did sell for?"

"A half-dollar, I think. No--two drinks of whiskey one cold
night. But what I sold was no more myself than--than the coat
I'd pawned and drunk up before I did it."

The plain calm way in which she said this made it so terrible
that he winced and turned away. "We have seen hell--haven't
we?" he muttered. He turned toward her with genuine passion
of feeling. "Susan," he cried, "don't be a fool. Let's push
our luck, now that things are coming our way. We need each
other--we want to stay together--don't we?"

"_I_ want to stay. I'm happy."

"Then--let's put the record straight."

"Let's keep it straight," replied she earnestly. "Don't ask
me to go where I don't belong. For I can't,
Freddie--honestly, I can't."

A pause. Then, "You will!" said he, not in blustering fury,
but in that cool and smiling malevolence which had made him
the terror of his associates from his boyhood days among the
petty thieves and pickpockets of Grand Street. He laid his
hand gently on her shoulder. "You hear me. I say you will."

She looked straight at him. "Not if you kill me," she said.
She rose to face him at his own height. "I've bought my
freedom with my body and with my heart and with my soul. It's
all I've got. I shall keep it.