et the money they
needed for dress and bridge, for matinees and lunches. Mrs.
Thurston insisted--and Ida was inclined to believe--that there
were genuine cases of this kind on the list.

"It's mighty hard for women with expensive tastes and small
means to keep straight in New York," said she to Susan. "It
costs so much to live, and there are so many ways to spend
money. And they always have rich lady friends who set an
extravagant pace. They've got to dress--and to kind of keep up
their end. So--" Ida laughed, went on: "Besides the city
women are getting so they like a little sporty novelty as much
as their brothers and husbands and fathers do. Oh, I'm not
ashamed of my business any more. We're as good as the others,
and we're not hypocrites. As my lawyer friend says,
everybody's got to make a _good_ living, and good livings can't
be made on the ways that used to be called on the
level--they're called damfool ways now."

Ida's third source of income was to her the most attractive
because it had such a large gambling element in it. This was
her flirtations as a respectable woman in search of lively
amusement and having to take care not to be caught. There are
women of all kinds who delight in deceiving men because it
gives them a sweet stealthy sense of superiority to the
condescending sex. In women of the Ida class this pleasure
becomes as much a passion as it is in the respectable woman
whom her husband tries to enslave. With Susan, another woman
and one in need of education, Ida was simple and scrupulously
truthful. But it would have been impossible for a man to get
truth as to anything from her. She amused herself inventing
plausible romantic stories about herself that she might enjoy
the gullibility of the boastfully superior and patronizing
male. She was devoid of sentiment, even of passion. Yet at
times she affected both in the most extreme fashion. And
afterward, with peals of laughter, she would describe to Susan
how the man had acted, what an ass she had made of him.

"Men despise us," she said. "But it's nothing to the way I
despise them. The best of them are rotten beasts when they
show themselves as they are. And they haven't any mercy on us.
It's too ridiculous. Men despise a man who is virtuous and a
woman who isn't. What rot!"

She deceived the "regulars" without taking the trouble to
remember her deceptions. They caught her lying so often that
she knew they thought her un