midnight
Clara , dressed to go to dinner with her lover , was waiting to arrange about their meeting to make together the usual rounds in the evening . `` I 've got an hour before I 'm due at the hospital , '' said Susan . `` Let 's go down to Kelly 's for a drink . '' While they were going and as they sat in the clean little back room of Kelly 's well ordered and select corner saloon , Clara gave her all the news she had gathered in an afternoon of visits among their acquaintances -- how , because of a neighborhood complaint , there was to be a fake raid on Gussie 's opium joint at midnight ; that Mazie had caught a frightful fever ; and that Nettie was dying in Governeur of the stab in the stomach her lover had given her at a ball three nights before ; that the police had raised the tariff for sporting houses , and would collect seventy-five and a hundred a month protection money where the charge had been twenty-five and fifty -- the plea was that the reformers , just elected and hoping for one term only , were compelling a larger fund from vice than the old steady year-in-and-year-out ruling crowd . `` And they may raise _ us _ to fifteen a week , '' said Clara , `` though I doubt it . They 'll not cut off their nose to spite their face . If they raised the rate for the streets they 'd drive two-thirds of the girls back to the factories and sweat shops .