Back STreet by Fannie Hurst

an established clientele in Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, and Kansas.
    “It isn’t exactly that I won’t go, Bakeless. Don’t put it that way.”
    “I’ll even go you one better, Ray. What say to coming all theway along? You and me could have Monday and Tuesday in Dayton. There’s an idea.…”
    “I’ll go with you one year from today.”
    “There you go again. Darnedest girl for letting a man know where he’s at. Well, anyway, it isn’t going to hurt you to take me as far as the depot. Come, here’s a couple going to dismiss a hansom. Hey, cabby, how much to C. H. and D.?”
    She sighed her acquiescence, her eyes smiling, but troubled with the thought of Kurt smoking an impatient pipe, as he waited on the deserted porch.
    It was cooler driving, bobbing along over cobblestones that flung them together and apart. Warmed with Rhine wine, conscious of her nearness, he became immediately amorous.
    “Every time I come to this town, I say to myself, the one thing that gives it tone is Ray Schmidt.”
    “Nit.”
    “True as I’m sitting here. I’ve good Cincinnati accounts, but the best account of them all, Ray Schmidt!” Under the wooden apron of the hansom cab, his hand, a dimpled one with an island of black hair on it, poked a forefinger into the hole of her kid glove.
    “If I wasn’t a married man …”
    Here it was again!
    “But the way people like you and me look at these things is broad-minded. I’m not a small man. The nicest little flat in the world would be none too good for a girl like you. What say?”
    The way to retort, as Tagenhorst would put it, was to haul off and slap his bluish jowl. Well, she wasn’t built that way. This traveling man sitting there making illicit proposal to her, his heavy hand sliding off and on her knee, was just part of the pitiable sordidness of so much of life. He was trying to squeeze his joy out of the none too joyful business of being drummer for a firm which dealt in surreys, traps, runabouts, cabs, and coaches. Of course he was being disloyal to vows and decencies and to his wife. But the fault seemed not so much his as it was the routinized scheme which permitted a man’s life to become a matter of surrey-upholstery, aging wives, Pullman cars, forbidden desires, and receding ideals.
    There was something vaster and more reprehensible and more soul-sickening than this lascivious-looking drummer who needed his face slapped. It was the scheme of things to which, bobbing along in the hansom cab, they were both more or less helpless parties. There were those, of course, who triumphed, and they became the great, good, wise ones of the earth. But that did not mean that somehow, terribly, the story of the mortalness of clay was any the less poignant. If only she were not sorry for Bakeless.
    “My life’s been all a compromise between what I wanted and what I got, Ray. You would be one thing I wanted—and got.”
    “Why,” she wanted to shout at him, “why do you dare to put to me a proposition that you would not broach to a single girl in this town except those who live on George Street? What is there about me makes a man feel I’m the kind a man can ask to be his mistress? An old dodo grandpap like you! Tell me. I want to know, in order that I may know this strange poor me, myself!”
    She did nothing of the sort, but withdrew her hand gently, and made a move at him.
    “That’s the way you feel now.”
    He caught her cheeks between his thumb and forefinger.
    “Don’t make those girl-I-left-behind-me eyes! I don’t want to leave you behind me. If you escape me once more, I’m going to advertise in
The Cincinnati Enquirer
personal column: ‘Will brunette in black sailor hat and checkered suit who ate supper at Mecklenburg’s last Sunday night please let me know where I get off with her?’ ”
    Ray (to herself): “Where do I get off? Where do I get off?”
    “Look! I want to give you something, Miss Ray. Little present I picked up yesterday at Hershey’s.