of the family, even if it's only a family of two and the other
one Mag! Look at me, with my name in the directory, a-paying milk
bills and meat bills and bread bills! Look at me with a place of
my own, where nobody's right's greater than my own; where no one
has a right but me and Mag; a place where--where there's nothing
to hide from the police!"

There's the rub, Mag, as Hamlet says--(I went to see it the other
night, so that I could take off the Ophelia--she used to be a
good mimic herself, before she tried to be a leading lady.) It
spoils you, this sense of safeness that goes with the honesty
graft. You lose the quickness of the hunter and the nerve of the
hunted. And--worse--you lose your taste for the old risky life.
You grow proud and fat, and you love every stick in the dear,
quiet little place that's your home--your own home. You love it
so that you'd be ashamed to sneak round where it could see
you--you who'd always walked upright before it with the step of
the mistress; with nothing in the world to be ashamed of; nothing
to prevent your staring each honest dish-pan in the face! 1>

And, Mag, you try--if you're me--to fit Tom Dorgan in here--Tom
Dorgan in stripes and savage sulks still--all these months--kept
away from the world, even the world behind bars! Maggie, don't
you wish Tom was a ventriloquist or--or an acrobat or--but this
isn't what I had to tell you.

Do you know what a society entertainer is, Miss Monahan? No?
Well, look at me. Yes, I'm one. Miss Nance Olden, whose services
are worth fifty dollars a night--at least, they were one night.