It was an
indestructible possession, apparently, too. You couldn't throw it away.
Dissipation, dishonesty, even a total collapse that brought its victim
down to the sink that he himself had sprouted from, seemed powerless to
efface that hall-mark.
He learned to suppose that if it were indestructible, it was also
unattainable, though perhaps he himself failed of attaining it only in
the consciousness of having failed--in the inability to stop trying for
it, straining all his actions through a sieve in the effort to conform
to a standard not his own.
Well, this girl, whose own life must have collapsed under her in a
peculiarly cruel and dramatic fashion so that she had had to come to him
and ask him for a job in the chorus--she had the hall-mark. She had
besides a lot of the qualities that traditionally went with it, but
often didn't. She was game--game as a fighting-cock. What must it not
have meant to her to come down into that squalid dance-hall in the first
place and submit to the test he had subjected her to! How must the
dressing-room conversation of her colleagues in the chorus have revolted
and sickened her? What must it mean to her to take his orders--sharp
rasping orders, with the sting of ridicule in the tail of them when they
had to be repeated;--to be addressed by her last name like a servant?
Why, this very afternoon, how must she have felt, standing there like a
manikin, ordered to put on this dress and that, by a fussy fat woman who
wouldn't have touched her with tongs? But from not one of these
experiences had he ever seen her flinch or protest.
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