Free Back STreet by Fannie Hurst Page A

commits it.”
    “I mean if he isn’t married.…”
    “Why, no, Baby. What a silly you are.”
    “Ray?”
    “Yes.”
    “Do you know that nuns are awful bad?”
    “No.”
    “Well, they are. There’s a girl in my class named Katy Schwa-baker, who went to a convent-school. She says … Oh, you ought to hear what she says about—”
    “Stop filling your ears with such. It’s all talk made up by dirty-minded girls with nothing on their minds but nastiness.”
    “And you know what she says, Ray? She says you can make a man marry you by pretending you’re going to have a baby.”
    “Freda, you deserve to have your mouth washed with lye and soap.”
    “But you have to be bad before you can pretend that, don’t you?”
    “Why do you think such things?”
    “
You
think them, only you don’t say them.”
    “I do not.”
    “You do so! With all the men running after you, how can you help thinking about what makes them do it?”
    There was something to that, only Freda’s foul-mouthed little manner of suggesting it made it loathsome. Naturally her thoughts sometimes turned to the riddle of the unanimity of the male reaction toward her. Yet who would believe, Freda least of all, how seldom, considering, such scuttling little rats of sex-thoughts as her stepsister’s darted through her own brain? There was something latent and fearful and wonderful—something dangerous and shot with the glory of being alive—in this constant teasing sense of the mystery of sex. Ray sensed that, of course. What girl didn’t? You couldn’t help thinking sometimes of the something in you that you knew was there latent, but which up to now had never been really stirred by the touch of a man. With Freda, now, it was different. She was a seething hotbed of forbidden flickers of passion. Darts of desire, in the form of the ugly questions, were constantly on her lips. How in the world expect to make Freda, lying there beside her, believe that she, Ray, did not harbor the same secret and forbidden thoughts that had been bandied among the girls in the locker room at Freda’s parochial school?
    What good did it do to try to make her understand that someof her lascivious questions were couched in a phraseology that was absolutely ununderstandable to Ray?
    “Don’t know what I mean? Oh no, you don’t know. If I know as much as I do—how much must you know!”
    How much must Ray know! The question tormented Freda. How good was Ray? How bad? How did she handle men? Had she ever …? How fly was she really? Except on her trips to New York and the visit to the St. Louis annual exposition that she had once made with her father, there had never been a night which Ray had not spent in the house on Baymiller Street. Staying out all night was part of it when girls were supposed to be bad. Probably, as Tagenhorst said, “Ray had it behind her ears.” What was it kept the toniest men hotfooting after Ray, if it wasn’t—that? What was it, but that, gave a girl the name of being fly? Girls didn’t let themselves get that reputation just for the good dinners and shows that were in it. Why, most of the men Ray ran with were married men and would cut her dead if they met her with their wives or daughters. Just how fly was Ray? Where did it get her? Kurt Shendler, a bicycle-mechanic, was the only fellow in town on the level with her. A tony girl like Ray having to wind up and marry a domestic product like Kurt! What was the mystery of Ray? Was it possible that she had no realization of the importance of sitting herself pretty? Or was it that she had some bee in her bonnet that would fool them all? Or would she be content to become the mistress of one of the town’s big men or one of those New York traveling fellows or brokers who were always after her? Not for Freda. Marriage. Security. Freedom from the bickering thraldom of Tagenhorst, and now, with the few dollars from the sale of the house in the offing, the threat of having Marshall and his