“Sure!  He’s got a wife and two kids here in Boston.  That was a twenty-one round knockout!  Maybe I didn’t have something to tell him when he blew into Hampton last Friday!  But he said he couldn’t help it—­he loved me.”  Lise sat up, seemingly finding relief in the relation of her wrongs, dabbing her eyes with a cheap lace handkerchief.  “Well, while he’d been away—­this thing came.  I didn’t know what was the matter at first, and when I found out I was scared to death, I was ready to kill myself.  When I told him he was scared too, and then he said he’d fix it.  Say, I was a goat to think he’d marry me!” Lise laughed hysterically.

“And then—­” Janet spoke with difficulty, “and then you came down here?”

“I told him he’d have to see me through, I’d start something if he didn’t.  Say, he almost got down on his knees, right there in Gruber’s!  But he came back inside of ten seconds—­he’s a jollier, for sure, he was right there with the goods, it was because he loved me, he couldn’t help himself, I was his cutie, and all that kind of baby talk.”

Lise’s objective manner of speaking about her seducer amazed Janet.

“Do you love him?” she asked.

“Say, what is love?” Lise demanded.  “Do you ever run into it outside of the movies?  Do I love him?  Well, he’s a good looker and a fancy dresser, he ain’t a tight wad, and he can start a laugh every minute.  If he hadn’t put it over on me I wouldn’t have been so sore.  I don’t know he ain’t so bad.  He’s weak, that’s the trouble with him.”

This was the climax!  Lise’s mental processes, her tendency to pass from wild despair to impersonal comment, her inability, her courtesan’s temperament that prevented her from realizing tragedy for more than a moment at a time—­even though the tragedy were her own—­were incomprehensible to Janet.

“Get on to this,” Lise adjured her.  “When I first was acquainted with him he handed me a fairy tale that he was taking five thousand a year from Humphrey and Gillmount, he was going into the firm.  He had me razzle-dazzled.  He’s some hypnotizes as a salesman, too, they say.  Nothing was too good for me; I saw myself with a house on the avenue shopping in a limousine.  Well, he blew up, but I can’t help liking him.”

“Liking him!” cried Janet passionately.  “I’d kill him that’s what I’d do.”

Lise regarded her with unwilling admiration.

“That’s where you and me is different,” she declared.  “I wish I was like that, but I ain’t.  And where would I come in?  Now you’re wise why I can’t go back to Hampton.  Even if I was stuck on the burg and cryin’ my eyes out for the Bagatelle I couldn’t go back.”

“What are you going to do?” Janet demanded.