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deeply it goes with you, how it has become love, then he would respond to that love out of a sense of responsibility to you, if nothing more. And you don’t want that. It’s too late for that. And it has been too late for over two years.
    It is just simple logic. You cannot give yourself away totally to any man, no matter how great your need, if you no longer belong to yourself. And you do not belong to yourself, girl. You are leased out, in perpetuity. You belong to Them, and They are very relaxed and casual about their ownership until it is time to use your specialservices. Then if you try to refuse, They know exactly how to explain the fact of ownership to you, and there is nothing to do but take your orders. You no longer belong to yourself.
    Max Hanes gives the orders and, when it is over, you have the bonus—which he did not have to give you—and another smutch that won’t scrub off, and more material for bad dreams.
    It is your problem, and nothing to be wished on Hugh, bless him.
    As she swam there, feeling the long good stretch of her muscles, all her years were with her, clotted darkly in her throat, gagging her. And, as was her habit at such times, she cursed that girl she hardly knew, that Betty Dawson of nine years ago, that Stanford sophomore, that only daughter of Dr. Randolph Dawson, that girl of irritable restlessness, who felt cloistered and frustrated, and believed with all her heart she had great talent. Dazzled by the show biz dream, she was a perfect setup for the first cruel selfish bastard who came along and saw the dream and was willing to take it in trade.
    Jackie Luster was the one who happened along. He had grinned at her out of the sleazy covers of two score fan magazines. He was glamor and importance and Her Big Chance. Naturally, the despair and heartbreak of her father meant nothing. The world had turned into a dream. When her father started to take legal action to get her away from Jackie, they went away together. They left the state. She was eighteen. She learned later that Jackie was at a low point in his career. He needed something fresh and young to set him off, so he bought material and worked up a double, and he trained her in heartless ways until she was the image he wanted. It was too late then to turn back.
    They auditioned in Chicago and got a spot in a sleazy club in Cicero, and they were on their way. Somehow it was never the time or the place to get married. He had a vile temper, and he knew how to use his small hard fists so they hurt, and nothing hurt too much if you used a few drinks for a pillow. But, bruised or hungover or heartbroken, you always had to stand up in front of the baby spot and do it the way you were taught to do it—in Cicero, Chicago, Bayonne, Miami Beach, Biloxi, Mexico City.
    Dreams die in strange ways. The show biz dream persisted longer than it should have, while she lived in shabby places with Jackie Luster and served him in the ways he demanded. But on a strangely disorganized housepartygiven by people who owned a club they were working, Jackie found it either politic, or a gesture of protest against her humble possessiveness, to load her up drunk enough so he could turn her over to one of the owners, in whose bed she awakened, at whose bedside she vomited. And though it was only peripheral, it killed what was left of the dream. It buried the wide-eyed sophomore. From then on, of course, there was much less chance of turning back, no chance at all to be Doctor Dawson’s pretty daughter ever again. And she continued to fulfill Jackie’s requirements, in an icy acceptance of a bargain made for better reasons.
    Three years ago they were booked into Vegas, into the Glad Room at the Mozambique, and Jackie was beginning to get it all back, that perfect edge of timing, and a more judicious selection of material. As the room began to jump for him, he began to cut her material, shortening the musical bits, fattening his end of the monologue. After six