Albert Payson Terhune

“ Mercer hadn't a moral to her back. And she had a spite to work off on her ex-family-in-law. And she grew to love the life. And there was a tolerable living in it for her. And it kept her from being lonesome. And it was nice to have folks to order around. So Mrs. Mercer was pretty happy. She had craved to lap up excitement. And she got it (like the house's liquor) by the wholesale. It was the life she was suited to. The longer it lasted the surer she was of that.
She came of a million times better class than most Rahabettes. And that helped. For she catered only to the “Double A” trade. ”

“ Servants, too, helped keep Mrs. Mercer from sleeping too peaceful. Say! Respectable folks think they're pestered by the servant question. They have a cinch. If they want to know what a nightmare the servant question really is—let 'em try running a place like Mrs. Mercer's.
She had to pay extra big wages, of course, to keep any sort of servants at all. Even black ones—the only kind generally that'll work for the Rahabettes. Besides big wages, she had to stand for quick raises, for laziness, for incompetence, for every fault a servant can have. ”

“ Every woman thinks she looks like some siren of history. Just as every woman knows, at heart, that she could be a great actress if she had half a quarter of a chance. And just as every tubby, undersized, smooth-shaven, light-eyed man thinks he looks like Napoleon ”

“ By one Raegan. Let me tell you, in a mouthful or so of words, some of the things that swallowed Mrs. Mercer's profits; same as they gobble the excess cash of every Merchant of Venus.
You're likely doping up in your mind what the rent of the average city house would be, and the cost of food and servants; and trying to subtract that petty sum from the profits. Likewise you're figuring what those profits must have been when Mrs. Mercer sold California champagne at seven dollars a quart and flat bottled domestic beer at seventy-five cents a pint and bum cigarettes at half a dollar the box of ten. ”

“ Fauquier's establishment straightway got a name for lofty propriety that made out-of-town mothers fall over their own feet in the rush to pay frontier rates for the privilege of placing their music-study daughters in her pure charge. ”

“ Men are too careless about who they lend the use of their names to. Any man of sense, looking at Mattie, from the time she was expelled from grammar school, would have hung out the “No Matrimony” sign in a hurry. And scuttled up a tree till she had moved past.
It didn't take Mattie long to make a fairly good beginning, and to stop being “Mattie” and become “Mrs. Mercer.” Maybe you think there was a fortune in it. Most people do. They think the middlewoman's profits are enormous, and that the Mrs. Mercers usually stack up the coin in millions. ”

“ Jubal Lee Fauquier; the Richmond relict of a silver-lunged Virginia Senator; and the daughter of a professionally gallant Confederate general who had fallen in defense of States' Rights shortly before the first battle of Bull Run.
The South is always a sure card. And the farther north you go, the better it gets.
Mattie ran the boarding house just to keep her from having time to brood over a glories in the dreamy Southland.
The prices she charged helped a lot, too. Folks will break themselves to see a six-dollar show when they'd be dead leary of it if the admission was fifty cents. ”

“ Mercer's profits, in swads, and left her every month with about half a wastebasket full of fives, tens, twenties, fifties and hundreds, that her bank was too haughty and fastidious to accept as deposits.
And yet you say the law is easier on women than on men? Any man could jug a man who handed him such bills for value received. ”

“ Tell him I'm never going to pay anything again to anyone of the vulture breed. That means a raid. I know. Now, for old time's sake, slip me a warning when to expect it. I'll try to see it's spectacular enough to put the captain's name in every paper. Tell him so.”
She got word half an hour later that the raid was scheduled for eleven fifteen that evening. And the cop was taken away from in front of the door. That reform captain sure had sense. If only in his wardman's name. He took her tip and played it strong. Sweet are the uses of advertisement.
Mrs. Mercer hadn't much time to squander. ”

“ Mercer's bill, and they'd transfer their trade to some house where their credit was still strong. A cute trick.
Say, did you ever stop to think what a cinch all men have in passing off counterfeit money on the Mrs. Mercers of this world? And how much of it is done? It's so easy that it's plain unsportsmanlike. Almost dishonest. A man with a bundle of phoney bills can always get rid of it at such places. If the bills are fairly well got up.
Mrs. Mercer couldn't tell a clever counterfeit bill from real currency, any more than you or most other amachoors can. Especially by artificial light. ”