EXTRACT

(Dol McQueen and her friend Ness have left San Francisco after the
suicide of one of the other girls in the brothel where they worked, a girl
called Alice Lebo. On the journey to the silver-mining boomtown of
Virginia City, Nevada, to make a fresh start, they stop at a lake hotel
in the Sierra Nevada mountains. There's a wedding taking place there -
a big one - the groom has made a fortune in silver-mining. Ness and
Dol have a conversation in a private room of the hotel, as the wedding
guests dance on the floor below.)

"What is it you want to tell me?" I asked.
You could hear the hop downstairs. "I made up my mind," Ness said.
"I'm tired of the flash-house life. I'm going to square it."
The entire hotel gave the tiniest sort of bounce, like the bounce of a
billiard ball dropped onto heavy old wood.
"When?" I said. "Next year?"
"Soon as I make the silver town."
"Soon as you hit the richest place on earth?"
Ness was leaning against the wash-basin. She put on her spectacles to
look at me better. "It's a short life being a flash-girl. You have
to make your pile fast and quit. It's hard to live with three other
girls, and the house is liable to fire you when you turn mean. It's a
hard life on the loose. Those street-fairies been chawed up pretty
good."
"I don't intend to set up as a cheap pick-up."
She frowned a little. "It don't bother you what happened to Alice
Lebo?"
After Alice died Mrs. Liberty stripped her bed naked. Two nights I
shared a room with that bad-stained mattress.
"Won't happen to me," I said.
"Never a week goes by without one of the girls eats her dose."
"That's their look-out."
"I'm right down sorry to hear you talk this way. I hoped you'd come
in partners with me. I want to start a dry goods store."
In the dance room below someone was making a speech, holding that
dizzy wedding crowd of drunks in a perfectly wonderful silence until the
snap-line. Then they laughed and stamped their feet so loud the scrub
women in the kitchen stopped scraping the crockery for a few moments.
I said, "Ever run a dry-goods store?"
"I bought a book on single-entry book-keeping. I been studying it in
snatches." She wasn't any louder than a rustle. She got a fright when
she heard herself sound so feeble, and petered out.
"I don't mean to be cruel, Ness, but we wouldn't know where to begin."
"We have capital, don't we? We don't need to persuade a bank we can
do it."
You know you're going to die but you don't know the day and the month
and the year and that way you can put it off. It was like Ness had
named the day. I was devastated. Didn't she know me any better than to
propose I spend the rest of my life selling curtains? You can say what
you like about the trials of the flash life but nobody asks you to tone
down your personality. Would you ask an actress to serve behind a
counter? She'd be a nothing.

 

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