Susan Lenox, Rise/Fall
by David Graham Phillips
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman
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"What are you going to do?" asked the young man, when the
acquaintance had become a friendship--which was before the
peaches and ice cream were served.

"I don't, know " said the girl, with the secretive instinct of
self-reliance hiding the unhappiness his abrupt question set to
throbbing again.

"Honestly, I've never met anyone that was so congenial. But
maybe you don't feel that way?"

"Then again maybe I do," rejoined she, forcing a merry smile.

His face flushed with embarrassment, but his eyes grew more
ardent as he said: "What were you looking for, when I saw you
in Garfield Place?"

"Was that Garfield Place?" she asked, in evasion.

"Yes." And he insisted, "What were you looking for?"

"What were _you_ looking for?"

"For a pretty girl." They both laughed. "And I've found her. I'm
suited if you are. . . . Don't look so serious. You haven't
answered my question."

"I'm looking for work."

He smiled as if it were a joke. "You mean for a place on the stage.
That isn't work. _You_ couldn't work. I can see that at a glance."

"Why not?"

"Oh, you haven't been brought up to that kind of life. You'd
hate it in every way. And they don't pay women anything for
work. My father employs a lot of them. Most of his girls live at
home. That keeps the wages down, and the others have to piece
out with"--he smiled--"one thing and another."

Susan sat gazing straight before her. "I've not had much
experience," she finally said, thoughtfully. "I guess I don't
know what I'm about."

The young man leaned toward her, his face flushing with
earnestness. "You don't know how pretty you are. I wish my
father wasn't so close with me. I'd not let you ever speak of
work again--even on the stage. What good times we could have!"

"I must be going," said she, rising. Her whole body was
alternately hot and cold. In her brain, less vague now, were the
ideas Mabel Connemora had opened up for her.

"Oh, bother!" exclaimed he. "Sit down a minute. You
misunderstood me. I don't mean I'm flat broke."

Susan hastily reseated herself, showing her confusion. "I wasn't
thinking of that."

"Then--what were you thinking of?"

"I don't know," she replied--truthfully, for she could not have
put into words anything definite about the struggle raging in
her like a battle in a fog. "I often don't exactly know what I'm
thinking about. I somehow can't--can't fit it together--yet."

"Do you suppose," he went on, as if she had not spoken, "do you
suppose I don't understand? I know you can't afford to let me
take your time for nothing. . . . Don't you like me a little?"

She looked at him with grave friendliness. "Yes." Then, seized
with a terror which her habitual manner of calm concealed from
him, she rose again.

"Why shouldn't it be me as well as another?. . . At least sit
down till I pay the bill."

She seated herself, stared at her plate.

"Now what are you thinking about?" he asked.

"I don't know exactly. Nothing much."

The waiter brought the bill. The young man merely glanced at the
total, drew a small roll of money from his trousers pocket, put
a five-dollar note on the tray with the bill. Susan's eyes
opened wide when the waiter returned with only two quarters and
a dime. She glanced furtively at the young man, to see if he, too,
was not disconcerted. He waved the tray carelessly aside; the
waiter said "Thank you," in a matter-of-course way, dropped the
sixty cents into his pocket. The waiter's tip was by itself almost
as much as she had ever seen paid out for a meal for two persons.

"Now, where shall we go?" asked the young man.

Susan did not lift her eyes. He leaned toward her, took her
hand. "You're different from the sort a fellow usually finds,"
said he. "And I'm--I'm crazy about you. Let's go," said he.

Susan took her bundle, followed him. She glanced up the street
and down. She had an impulse to say she must go away alone; it
was not strong enough to frame a sentence, much less express her
thought. She was seeing queer, vivid, apparently disconnected
visions--Burlingham, sick unto death, on the stretcher in the
hospital reception room--Blynn of the hideous face and loose,
repulsive body--the contemptuous old gentleman in the shop--odds
and ends of the things Mabel Connemora had told her--the roll of
bills the young man had taken from his pocket when he paid--Jeb
Ferguson in the climax of the horrors of that wedding day and
night. They went to Garfield Place, turned west, paused after a
block or so at a little frame house set somewhat back from the
street. The young man, who had been as silent as she--but
nervous instead of preoccupied--opened the gate in the picket fence.

"This is a first-class quiet place," said he, embarrassed but
trying to appear at ease.

Susan hesitated. She must somehow nerve herself to speak of
money, to say to him that she needed ten dollars--that she must
have it. If she did not speak--if she got nothing for Mr.
Burlingham--or almost nothing--and probably men didn't give
women much--if she were going with him--to endure again the
horrors and the degradation she had suffered from Mr.
Ferguson--if it should be in vain! This nice young man didn't
suggest Mr. Ferguson in any way. But there was such a mystery
about men--they had a way of changing so--Sam Wright--Uncle
George even Mr. Ferguson hadn't seemed capable of torturing a
helpless girl for no reason at all----

"We can't stand here," the young man was saying.

She tried to speak about the ten dollars. She simply could not
force out the words. With brain in a whirl, with blood beating
suffocatingly into her throat and lungs, but giving no outward
sign of agitation, she entered the gate. There was a low,
old-fashioned porch along the side of the house, with an awning
curiously placed at the end toward the street. When they
ascended the steps under the awning, they were screened from the
street. The young man pulled a knob. A bell within tinkled
faintly; Susan started, shivered. But the young man, looking
straight at the door, did not see. A colored girl with a
pleasant, welcoming face opened, stood aside for them to enter.
He went straight up the stairs directly ahead, and Susan
followed. At the threshold the trembling girl looked round in
terror. She expected to see a place like that foul, close little
farm bedroom--for it seemed to her that at such times men must
seek some dreadful place--vile, dim, fitting. She was in a
small, attractively furnished room, with a bow window looking
upon the yard and the street. The furniture reminded her of her
own room at her uncle's in Sutherland, except that the brass bed
was far finer. He closed the door and locked it.

As he advanced toward her he said: "_What_ are you seeing? Please
don't look like that." Persuasively, "You weren't thinking of
me--were you?"

"No--Oh, no," replied she, passing her hand over her eyes to try
to drive away the vision of Ferguson.

"You look as if you expected to be murdered. Do you want to go?"

She forced herself to seem calm. "What a coward I am!" she said
to herself. "If I could only die for him, instead of this. But
I can't. And I _must_ get money for him."

To the young man she said: "No. I--I--want to stay."

Late in the afternoon, when they were once more in the street,
he said. "I'd ask you to go to dinner with me, but I haven't
enough money."

She stopped short. An awful look came into her face.

"Don't be alarmed," cried he, hurried and nervous, and blushing
furiously. "I put the--the present for you in that funny little
bundle of yours, under one of the folds of the nightgown or
whatever it is you've got wrapped on the outside. I didn't like
to hand it to you. I've a feeling somehow that you're not
regularly--that kind."

"Was it--ten dollars?" she said, and for all he could see she
was absolutely calm.

"Yes," replied he, with a look of relief followed by a smile of
amused tenderness.

"I can't make you out," he went on. "You're a queer one. You've
had a look in your eyes all afternoon--well, if I hadn't been
sure you were experienced, you'd almost have frightened me away."

"Yes, I've had experience. The--the worst," said the girl.

"You--you attract me awfully; you've got--well, everything
that's nice about a woman--and at the same time, there's
something in your eyes----Are you very fond of your friend?"

"He's all I've got in the world."

"I suppose it's his being sick that makes you look and act so queer?"

"I don't know what's the matter with me," she said slowly.
"I--don't know."

"I want to see you again--soon. What's your address?"

"I haven't any. I've got to look for a place to live."

"Well, you can give me the place you did live. I'll write you
there, Lorna. You didn't ask me my name when I asked you yours.
You've hardly said anything. Are you always quiet like this?"

"No--not always. At Least, I haven't been."

"No. You weren't, part of the time this afternoon--at the
restaurant. Tell me, what are you thinking about all the time?
You're very secretive. Why don't you tell me? Don't you know I
like you?"

"I don't know," said the girl in a slow dazed way. "I--don't--know."

"I wouldn't take your time for nothing," he went on, after a
pause. "My father doesn't give me much money, but I think I'll
have some more day after tomorrow. Can I see you then?"

"I don't know."

He laughed. "You said that before. Day after tomorrow
afternoon--in the same place. No matter if it's raining. I'll be
there first--at three. Will you come?"

"If I can."

She made a movement to go. But still he detained her. He colored
high again, in the struggle between the impulses of his generous
youth and the fear of being absurd with a girl he had picked up
in the street. He looked at her searchingly, wistfully. "I know
it's your life, but--I hate to think of it," he went on. "You're
far too nice. I don't see how you happened to be in--in this
line. Still, what else is there for a girl, when she's up
against it? I've often thought of those things--and I don't feel
about them as most people do. . . . I'm curious about you.
You'll pardon me, won't you? I'm afraid I'll fall in love with
you, if I see you often. You won't fail to come day after tomorrow?"

"If I can."

"Don't you want to see me again?"

She did not speak or lift her eyes.

"You like me, don't you?"

Still no answer.

"You don't want to be questioned?"

"No," said the girl.

"Where are you going now?"

"To the hospital."

"May I walk up there with you? I live in Clifton. I can go home
that way."

"I'd rather you didn't."

"Then--good-by--till day after tomorrow at three." He put out
his hand; he had to reach for hers and take it. "You're not--not
angry with me?"

"No."

His eyes lingered tenderly upon her. "You are _so_ sweet! You
don't know how I want to kiss you. Are you sorry to go--sorry to
leave me--just a little?. . . I forgot. You don't like to be
questioned. Well, good-by, dear."

"Good-by," she said; and still without lifting her gaze from the
ground she turned away, walked slowly westward.

She had not reached the next street to the north when she
suddenly felt that if she did not sit she would drop. She lifted
her eyes for an instant to glance furtively round. She saw a
house with stone steps leading up to the front doors; there was
a "for rent" sign in one of the close-shuttered parlor windows.
She seated herself, supported the upper part of her weary body
by resting her elbows on her knees. Her bundle had rolled to the
sidewalk at her feet. A passing man picked it up, handed it to
her, with a polite bow. She looked at him vaguely, took the
bundle as if she were not sure it was hers.

"Heat been too much for you, miss?" asked the man.

She shook her head. He lingered, talking volubly--about the
weather--then about how cool it was on the hilltops. "We might
go up to the Bellevue," he finally suggested, "if you've nothing
better to do."

"No, thank you," she said.

"I'll go anywhere you like. I've got a little money that I don't
care to keep."

She shook her head.

"I don't mean anything bad," he hastened to suggest--because
that would bring up the subject in discussable form.

"I can't go with you," said the girl drearily. "Don't bother me, please."

"Oh--excuse me." And the man went on.

Susan turned the bundle over in her lap, thrust her fingers
slowly and deliberately into the fold of the soiled blouse which
was on the outside. She drew out the money. A ten and two fives.
Enough to keep his room at the hospital for two weeks. No, for
she must live, herself. Enough to give him a room one week
longer and to enable her to live two weeks at least. . . . And
day after tomorrow--more. Perhaps, soon--enough to see him
through the typhoid. She put the money in her bosom, rose and
went on toward the hospital. She no longer felt weary, and the
sensation of a wound that might ache if she were not so numb
passed away.

A clerk she had not seen before was at the barrier desk. "I came
to ask how Mr. Burlingham is," said she.

The clerk yawned, drew a large book toward him.
"Burlingham--B--Bu--Bur----" he said half to himself, turning
over the leaves. "Yes--here he is." He looked at her. "You his
daughter?"

"No, I'm a friend."

"Oh--then--he died at five o'clock--an hour ago."

He looked up--saw her eyes--only her eyes. They were a deep
violet now, large, shining with tragic softness--like the eyes
of an angel that has lost its birthright through no fault of its
own. He turned hastily away, awed, terrified, ashamed of himself.

                         CHAPTER XVIII

THE next thing she knew, she felt herself seized strongly by the
arm. She gazed round in a dazed way. She was in the street--how
she got there she had no idea. The grip on her arm--it was the
young doctor, Hamilton. "I called you twice," explained he, "but
you didn't hear."

"He is dead," said she.

Hamilton had a clear view of her face now. There was not a trace
of the child left. He saw her eyes--quiet, lonely, violet stars.
"You must go and rest quietly, " he said with gentleness. "You
are worn out."

Susan took from her bosom the twenty dollars, handed it to him.
"It belongs to him," said she. "Give it to them, to bury him."
And she started on.

"Where are you going?" asked the young man.

Susan stopped, looked vaguely at him. "Good-by," she said.
"You've been very kind."

"You've found a boarding place?"

"Oh, I'm all right."

"You want to see him?"

"No. Then he'll always be alive to me."

"You had better keep this money. The city will take care of the funeral."

"It belong to him. I couldn't keep it for myself. I must be going."

"Shan't I see you again?"

"I'll not trouble you."

"Let me walk with you as far as your place."

"I'm not feeling--just right. If you don't mind--please--I'd
rather be alone."

"I don't mean to intrude, but----"

"I'm all right," said the girl. "Don't worry about me."

"But you are too young----"

"I've been married. . . . Thank you, but--good-by."

He could think of no further excuse for detaining her. Her
manner disquieted him, yet it seemed composed and natural.
Probably she had run away from a good home, was now sobered and
chastened, was eager to separate herself from the mess she had
got into and return to her own sort of people. It struck him as
heartless that she should go away in this fashion; but on second
thought, he could not associate heartlessness with her. Also, he
saw how there might be something in what she had said about not
wishing to have to think of her friend as dead. He stood
watching her straight narrow young figure until it was lost to
view in the crowd of people going home from work.

Susan went down Elm Street to Garfield Place, seated herself on
one of the benches. She was within sight of the unobtrusive
little house with the awnings; but she did not realize it. She
had no sense of her surroundings, of the passing of time, felt
no grief, no sensation of any kind. She simply sat, her little
bundle in her lap, her hands folded upon it.

A man in uniform paused before her. "Closing-up time," he said,
sharply but in the impartial official way. "I'm going to lock
the gates."

She looked at him.

In a softer, apologetic tone, he said, "I've got to lock the
gates. That's the law, miss."

She did not clearly understand, but rose and went out into Race
Street. She walked slowly along, not knowing or caring where.
She walked--walked--walked. Sometimes her way lay through crowded
streets, again through streets deserted. Now she was stumbling
over the uneven sidewalks of a poor quarter; again it was the
smooth flagstones of the shopping or wholesale districts.
Several times she saw the river with its multitude of boats
great and small; several times she crossed the canal. Twice she
turned back because the street was mounting the hills behind the
city--the hills with the cars swiftly ascending and descending
the inclined planes, and at the crests gayly lighted pavilions
where crowds were drinking and dancing. Occasionally some man
spoke to her, but desisted as she walked straight on, apparently
not hearing. She rested from time to time, on a stoop or on a
barrel or box left out by some shopkeeper, or leaning upon the
rail of a canal bridge. She was walking with a purpose--to try
to scatter the dense fog that had rolled in and enveloped her
mind, and then to try to think.

She sat, or rather dropped, down from sheer fatigue, in that
cool hour which precedes the dawn. It happened to be the steps
of a church. She fell into a doze, was startled back to
consciousness by the deep boom of the bell in the steeple; it
made the stone vibrate under her. One--two--three--four! Toward
the east there shone a flush of light, not yet strong enough to
dim the stars. The sky above her was clear. The pall of smoke
rolled away. The air felt clean and fresh, even had in it a
reminiscence of the green fields whence it had come. She began
to revive, like a sleeper shaking off drowsiness and the spell
of a bad dream and looking forward to the new day. The fog that
had swathed and stupefied her brain seemed to have lifted. At
her heart there was numbness and a dull throbbing, an ache; but
her mind was clear and her body felt intensely, hopelessly
alive and ready, clamorously ready, for food. A movement across
the narrow street attracted her attention. A cellar door was
rising--thrust upward by the shoulders of a man. It fell full
open with a resounding crash, the man revealed by the light from
beneath--a white blouse, a white cap. Toward her wafted the
delicious odor of baking bread. She rose, hesitated only an
instant, crossed the street directly toward the baker who had
come up to the surface for cool air.

"I am hungry," said she to him. "Can't you let me have something
to eat?"

The man--he had a large, smooth, florid face eyed her in amused
astonishment. "Where'd you jump from?" he demanded.

"I was resting on the church steps over there. The smell came to
me and--I couldn't stand it. I can pay."

"Oh, that's all right," said the man, with a strong German
accent. "Come down." And he descended the steps, she following.
It was a large and lofty cellar, paved with cement; floor,
ceilings, walls, were whitened with flour. There were long clean
tables for rolling the dough; big wooden bowls; farther back,
the ovens and several bakers at work adding to the huge piles of
loaves the huge baskets of rolls. Susan's eyes glistened; her
white teeth showed in a delightful smile of hunger about to be
satisfied.

"Do you want bread or rolls?" asked the German. Then without
waiting for her to answer, "I guess some of the `sweet rolls,'
we call 'em, would about suit a lady."

"Yes--the sweet rolls," said the girl.

The baker fumbled about behind a lot of empty baskets, found a
sewing basket, filled it with small rolls--some crescent in
shape, some like lady fingers, some oval, some almost like
biscuit, all with pulverized sugar powdered on them thick as a
frosting. He set the little basket upon an empty kneading table.
"Wait yet a minute," he commanded, and bustled up a flight of
stairs. He reappeared with a bottle of milk and a piece of fresh
butter. He put these beside the basket of rolls, drew a stool up
before them. "How's that?" asked he, his hands on his hips, his
head on one side, and his big jolly face beaming upon her.
"Pretty good, don't it!"

Susan was laughing with pleasure. He pointed to the place well
down in the bottle of milk where the cream ended. "That's the
way it should be always--not so!" said he. She nodded. Then he
shook the bottle to remix the separated cream and milk. "So!" he
cried. Then--" _Ach, dummer Esel!_" he muttered, striking his
brow a resounding thwack with the flat of his hand. "A knife!"
And he hastened to repair that omission.

Susan sat at the table, took one of the fresh rolls, spread
butter upon it. The day will never come for her when she cannot
distinctly remember the first bite of the little sweet buttered
roll, eaten in that air perfumed with the aroma of baking bread.
The milk was as fine as it promised to be she drank it from the bottle.

The German watched her a while, then beckoned to his fellow
workmen. They stood round, reveling in the joyful sight of this
pretty hungry girl eating so happily and so heartily.

"The pie," whispered one workman to another.

They brought a small freshly baked peach pie, light and crisp
and brown. Susan's beautiful eyes danced. "But," she said to her
first friend among the bakers, "I'm afraid I can't afford it."

At this there was a loud chorus of laughter. "Eat it," said her friend.

And when she had finished her rolls and butter, she did eat it.
"I never tasted a pie like that," declared she. "And I like pies
and can make them too."

Once more they laughed, as if she had said the wittiest thing in
the world.

As the last mouthful of the pie was disappearing, her friend
said, "Another!"

"Goodness, no!" cried the girl. "I couldn't eat a bite more."

"But it's an apple pie." And he brought it, holding it on his big
florid fat hand and turning it round to show her its full beauty.

She sighed regretfully. "I simply can't," she said. "How much is
what I've had?"

Her friend frowned. "Vot you take me for--hey?" demanded he,
with a terrible frown--so terrible he felt it to be that,
fearing he had frightened her, he burst out laughing, to reassure.

"Oh, but I must pay," she pleaded. "I didn't come begging."

"Not a cent!" said her friend firmly. "I'm the boss. I won't take it."

She insisted until she saw she was hurting his feelings. Then
she tried to thank him; but he would not listen to that, either.
"Good-by--good-by," he said gruffly. "I must get to work once."
But she understood, and went with a light heart up into the
world again. He stood waist deep in the cellar, she hesitated
upon the sidewalk. "Good-by," she said, with swimming eyes.
"You don't know how good you've been to me."

"All right. Luck!" He waved his hand, half turned his back on
her and looked intently up the street, his eyes blinking.

She went down the street, turned the first corner, dropped on a
doorstep and sobbed and cried, out of the fullness of her heart.
When she rose to go on again, she felt stronger and gentler than
she had felt since her troubles began with the quarrel over Sam
Wright. A little further on she came upon a florist's shop in
front of which a wagon was unloading the supply of flowers for
the day's trade. She paused to look at the roses and carnations,
the lilies and dahlias, the violets and verbenas and geraniums.
The fast brightening air was scented with delicate odors. She
was attracted to a small geranium with many buds and two
full-blown crimson flowers.

"How much for that?" she asked a young man who seemed to be in charge.

He eyed her shrewdly. "Well, I reckon about fifteen cents,"
replied he.

She took from her bosom the dollar bill wrapped round the eighty
cents, gave him what he had asked. "No, you needn't tie it up,"
said she, as he moved to take it into the store. She went back
to the bakeshop. The cellar door was open, but no one was in
sight. Stooping down, she called: "Mr. Baker! Mr. Baker!"

The big smooth face appeared below.

She set the plant down on the top step. "For you," she said, and
hurried away.

On a passing street car she saw the sign "Eden Park." She had
heard of it--of its beauties, of the wonderful museum there. She
took the next car of the same line. A few minutes, and it was
being drawn up the inclined plane toward the lofty hilltops. She
had thought the air pure below. She was suddenly lifted through
a dense vapor--the cloud that always lies over the lower part of
the city. A moment, and she was above the cloud, was being
carried through the wide, clean tree-lined avenue of a beautiful
suburb. On either side, lawns and gardens and charming houses,
a hush brooding over them. Behind these walls, in comfortable
beds, amid the surroundings that come to mind with the word
"home," lay many girls such as she--happy, secure, sheltered.
Girls like herself. A wave of homesickness swept over her,
daunting her for a little while. But she fought it down, watched
what was going on around her. "I mustn't look back--I mustn't!
Nothing there for me." At the main gateway of the park she
descended. There indeed was the, to her, vast building
containing the treasures of art; but she had not come for that.
She struck into the first by-path, sought out a grassy slope
thickly studded with bushes, and laid herself down. She spread
her skirts carefully so as not to muss them. She put her bundle
under her head.

When she awoke the moon was shining upon her face--shining from
a starry sky!

She sat up, looked round in wonder. Yes--it was night
again--very still, very beautiful, and warm, with the air
fragrant and soft. She felt intensely awake, entirely
rested--and full of hope. It was as if during that long
dreamless sleep her whole being had been renewed and magically
borne away from the lands of shadow and pain where it had been
wandering, to a land of bright promise. Oh, youth, youth, that
bears so lightly the burden of the past, that faces so
confidently the mystery of the future! She listened--heard a
faint sound that moved her to investigate. Peering through the
dense bushes, she discovered on the grass in the shadow of the
next clump, a ragged, dirty man and woman, both sound asleep and
snoring gently. She watched them spellbound. The man's face was
deeply shaded by his battered straw hat. But she could see the
woman's face plainly--the thin, white hair, the sunken eyes and
mouth, the skeleton look of old features over which the dry skin
of age is tightly drawn. She gazed until the man, moving in his
sleep, kicked out furiously and uttered a curse. She drew back,
crawled away until she had put several clumps of bushes between
her and the pair. Then she sped down and up the slopes and did
not stop until she was where she could see, far below, the
friendly lights of the city blinking at her through the smoky mist.

She had forgotten her bundle! She did not know how to find the
place where she had left it; and, had she known, she would not
have dared return. This loss, however, troubled her little. Not
in vain had she dwelt with the philosopher Burlingham.

She seated herself on a bench and made herself comfortable. But
she no longer needed sleep. She was awake--wide awake--in every
atom of her vigorous young body. The minutes dragged. She was
impatient for the dawn to give the signal for the future to roll
up its curtain. She would have gone down into the city to walk
about but she was now afraid the police would take her in--and
that probably would mean going to a reformatory, for she could
not give a satisfactory account of herself. True, her older way
of wearing her hair and some slight but telling changes in her
dress had made her look less the child. But she could not hope
to pass for a woman full grown. The moon set; the starlight was
after a long, long time succeeded by the dawn of waking birds,
and of waking city, too--for up from below rose an ever louder
roar like a rising storm. In her restless rovings, she came upon
a fountain; she joined the birds making a toilet in its basin,
and patterned after them--washed her face and hands, dried them
on a handkerchief she by great good luck had put into her
stocking, smoothed her hair, her dress.

And still the sense of unreality persisted, cast its friendly
spell over this child-woman suddenly caught up from the quietest
of quiet lives and whirled into a dizzy vortex of strange events
without parallel, or similitude even, in anything she had ever
known. If anyone had suddenly asked her who she was and she had
tried to recall, she would have felt as if trying to remember a
dream. Sutherland--a faint, faint dream, and the show boat also.
Spenser--a romantic dream--or a first installment of a lovestory
read in some stray magazine. Burlingham--the theatrical
agent--the young man of the previous afternoon--the news of the
death that left her quite alone--all a dream, a tumbled, jumbled
dream, all passed with the night and the awakening. In her youth
and perfect health, refreshed by the long sleep, gladdened by
the bright new day, she was as irresponsible as the merry birds
chattering and flinging the water about at the opposite side of
the fountain's basin. She was now glad she had lost her bundle.
Without it her hands were free both hands free to take whatever
might offer next. And she was eager to see what that would be,
and hopeful about it--no--more than hopeful, confident.
Burlingham, aided by those highly favorable surroundings of the
show boat, and of the vagabond life thereafter, had developed in
her that gambler's spirit which had enabled him to play year
after year of losing hands with unabating courage--the spirit
that animates all the brave souls whose deeds awe the docile,
conventional, craven masses of mankind.

Leisurely as a truant she tramped back toward the city, pausing
to observe anything that chanced to catch her eye. At the moment
of her discovery of the difference between her and most girls
there had begun a cleavage between her and the social system.
And now she felt as if she were of one race and the rest of the
world of another and hostile race. She did not realize it, but
she had taken the first great step along the path that leads to
distinction or destruction. For the world either obeys or
tramples into dust those who, in whatever way, have a lot apart
from the common. She was free from the bonds of convention--free
to soar or to sink.

Her way toward the city lay along a slowly descending street
that had been, not so very long before, a country road. Block
after block there were grassy fields intersected by streets, as
if city had attempted a conquest of country and had abandoned
it. Again the vacant lots were disfigured with the ruins of a
shanty or by dreary dump heaps. For long stretches the way was
built up only on one side. The houses were for the most part
tenement with small and unprosperous shops or saloons on the
ground floor. Toward the foot of the hill, where the line of
tenements was continuous on either side, she saw a sign
"Restaurant" projecting over the sidewalk. When she reached it,
she paused and looked in. A narrow window and a narrow open door
gave a full view of the tiny room with its two rows of plain
tables. Near the window was a small counter with a case
containing cakes and pies and rolls. With back to the window sat
a pretty towheaded girl of about her own age, reading. Susan,
close to the window, saw that the book was Owen Meredith's
"Lucile," one of her own favorites. She could even read the words:

The ways they are many and wide, and seldom are two ways the same.

She entered. The girl glanced up, with eyes slowly changing from
far-away dreaminess to present and practical--pleasant blue eyes
with lashes and brows of the same color as the thick, neatly
done yellowish hair.

"Could I get a glass of milk and a roll?" asked Susan, a modest
demand, indeed, on behalf of a growing girl's appetite
twenty-four hours unsatisfied.

The blonde girl smiled, showing a clean mouth with excellent teeth.
"We sell the milk for five cents, the rolls three for a nickel."

"Then I'll take milk and three rolls," said Susan. "May I sit at
a table? I'll not spoil it."

"Sure. Sit down. That's what the tables are for." And the girl
closed the book, putting a chromo card in it to mark her place,
and stirred about to serve the customer. Susan took the table
nearest the door, took the seat facing the light. The girl set
before her a plate, a knife and fork, a little form of butter, a
tall glass of milk, and three small rolls in a large saucer.
"You're up and out early?" she said to Susan.

On one of those inexplicable impulses of frankness Susan
replied: "I've been sleeping in the park."

The girl had made the remark merely to be polite and was turning
away. As Susan's reply penetrated to her inattentive mind she
looked sharply at her, eyes opening wonderingly. "Did you get
lost? Are you a stranger in town? Why didn't you ask someone to
take you in?"

The girl reflected, realized. "That's so," said she. "I never
thought of it before. . . . Yes, that is so! It must be dreadful
not to have any place to go." She gazed at Susan with admiring
eyes. "Weren't you afraid--up in the park?"

"No," replied Susan. "I hadn't anything anybody'd want to steal."

"But some man might have----" The girl left it to Susan's
imagination to finish the sentence.

"I hadn't anything to steal," repeated Susan, with a kind of
cynical melancholy remotely suggestive of Mabel Connemora.

The restaurant girl retired behind the counter to reflect, while
Susan began upon her meager breakfast with the deliberation of
one who must coax a little to go a great ways. Presently the
girl said:

"Where are you going to sleep tonight?"

"Oh, that's a long ways off," replied the apt pupil of the
happy-go-lucky houseboat show. "I'll find a place, I guess."

The girl looked thoughtfully toward the street. "I was
wondering," she said after a while, "what I'd do if I was to find
myself out in the street, with no money and nowhere to go. . . .
Are you looking for something to do?"

"Do you know of anything?" asked Susan interested at once.

"Nothing worth while. There's a box factory down on the next
square. But only a girl that lives at home can work there. Pa
says the day's coming when women'll be like men--work at
everything and get the same wages. But it isn't so now. A girl's
got to get married."

Such a strange expression came over Susan's face that the
waitress looked apologetic and hastened to explain herself: "I
don't much mind the idea of getting married," said she.
"Only--I'm afraid I can never get the kind of a man I'd want.
The boys round here leave school before the girls, so the girls
are better educated. And then they feel above the boys of their
own class--except those boys that're beginning to get up in the
world--and those kind of boys want some girl who's above them
and can help them up. It's dreadful to be above the people you
know and not good enough for the people you'd like to know."

Susan was not impressed; she could not understand why the
waitress spoke with so much feeling. "Well," said she, pausing
before beginning on the last roll, "I don't care so long as I
find something to do."

"There's another thing," complained the waitress. "If you work
in a store, you can't get wages enough to live on; and you learn
things, and want to live better and better all the time. It
makes you miserable. And you can't marry the men who work at
nice refined labor because they don't make enough to marry on.
And if you work in a factory or as a servant, why all but the
commonest kind of men look down on you. You may get wages enough
to live on, but you can't marry or get up in the world."

"You're very ambitious, aren't you?"

"Indeed I am. I don't want to be in the working class." She was
leaning over the counter now, and her blond face was expressing
deep discontent and scorn. "I _hate_ working people. All of them
who have any sense look down on themselves and wish they could
get something respectable to do."

"Oh, you don't mean that," protested Susan. "Any kind of work's
respectable if it's honest."

"_You_ can say that," retorted the girl. "_You_ don't belong in
our class. You were brought up different. You are a _lady_."

Susan shrank and grew crimson. The other girl did not see. She
went on crossly:

"Upper-class people always talk about how fine it is to be an
honest workingman. But that's all rot. Let 'em try it a while.
And pa says it'll never be straightened out till everybody has
to work."

"What--what does your father do?"

"He was a cabinetmaker. Then one of the other men tipped over a
big chest and his right hand was crushed--smashed to pieces, so
he wasn't able to work any more. But he's mighty smart in his
brains. It's the kind you can't make any money out of. He has
read most everything. The trouble with pa was he had too much
heart. He wasn't mean enough to try and get ahead of the other
workmen, and rise to be a boss over them, and grind them down to
make money for the proprietor. So he stayed on at the bench--he
was a first-class cabinetmaker. The better a man is as a
workman, and the nicer he is as a man, the harder it is for him
to get up. Pa was too good at his trade--and too soft-hearted.
Won't you have another glass of milk?"

"No--thank you," said Susan. She was still hungry, but it
alarmed her to think of taking more than ten cents from her hoard.

"Are you going to ask for work at the box factory?"

"I'm afraid they wouldn't take me. I don't know how to make boxes."

"Oh, that's nothing," assured the restaurant girl.

"It's the easiest kind of work. But then an educated person can
pick up most any trade in a few days, well enough to get along.
They'll make you a paster, at first."

"How much does that pay?"

"He'll offer you two fifty a week, but you must make him give
you three. That's right for beginners. Then, if you stay on and
work hard, you'll be raised to four after six months. The
highest pay's five."

"Three dollars," said Susan. "How much can I rent a room for?"

The restaurant girl looked at her pityingly. "Oh, you can't
afford a room. You'll have to club in with three other girls and
take a room together, and cook your meals yourselves, turn about."

Susan tried not to show how gloomy this prospect seemed. "I'll
try," said she.

She paid the ten cents; her new acquaintance went with her to
the door, pointed out the huge bare wooden building displaying
in great letters "J. C. Matson, Paper Boxes." "You apply at the
office," said the waitress. "There'll be a fat black-complected
man in his shirt with his suspenders let down off his shoulders.

He'll be fresh with you. He used to be a working man himself, so
he hasn't any respect for working people. But he doesn't mean
any harm. He isn't like a good many; he lets his girls alone."

Susan had not got far when the waitress came running after her.
"Won't you come back and let me know how you made out?" she
asked, a little embarrassed. "I hope you don't think I'm fresh."

"I'll be glad to come," Susan assured her. And their eyes met in
a friendly glance.

"If you don't find a place to go, why not come in with me? I've
got only a very little bit of a room, but it's as big and a lot
cleaner than any you'll find with the factory girls."

"But I haven't any money," said Susan regretfully. "And I
couldn't take anything without paying."

"You could pay two dollars and a half a week and eat in with us.
We couldn't afford to give you much for that, but it'd be better
than what you'd get the other way."

"But you can't afford to do that."

The restaurant girl's mind was aroused, was working fast and
well. "You can help in the restaurant of evenings," she promptly
replied. "I'll tell ma you're so pretty you'll draw trade. And
I'll explain that you used to go to school with me--and have
lost your father and mother. My name's Etta Brashear."

"Mine's--Lorna Sackville," said Susan, blushing. "I'll come after
a while, and we'll talk about what to do. I may not get a place."

"Oh, you'll get it. He has hard work finding girls. Factories
usually pay more than stores, because the work's more looked
down on--though Lord knows it's hard to think how anything could
be more looked down on than a saleslady."

"I don't see why you bother about those things. What do they matter?"

"Why, everybody bothers about them. But you don't understand.
You were born a lady, and you'll always feel you've got social
standing, and people'll feel that way too."

"But I wasn't," said Susan earnestly. "Indeed, I wasn't. I was
born--a--a nobody. I can't tell you, but I'm just nobody. I
haven't even got a name."

Etta, as romantic as the next young girl, was only the more
fascinated by the now thrillingly mysterious stranger--so
pretty, so sweet, with such beautiful manners and strangely
outcast no doubt from some family of "high folks." "You'll be
sure to come? You won't disappoint me?"

Susan kissed Etta. Etta embraced Susan, her cheeks flushed, her
eyes brilliant. "`I've taken an awful fancy to you," she said.
"I haven't ever had an intimate lady friend. I don't care for
the girls round here. They're so fresh and common. Ma brought me
up refined; she's not like the ordinary working-class woman."

It hurt Susan deeply--why, she could not have quite
explained--to hear Etta talk in this fashion. And in spite of
herself her tone was less friendly as she said, "I'll come when
I find out."

                          CHAPTER XIX

IN the office of the factory Susan found the man Etta described.
He was seated, or, rather, was sprawled before an open and
overflowing rolltop desk, his collar and cuffs off, and his coat
and waistcoat also. His feet--broad, thick feet with knots at
the great toe joints bulging his shoes--were hoisted upon the
leaf of the desk. Susan's charms of person and manners so
wrought upon him that, during the exchange of preliminary
questions and answers, he slowly took down first one foot then
the other, and readjusted his once muscular but now loose and
pudgy body into a less loaferish posture. He was as unconscious
as she of the cause and meaning of these movements. Had he
awakened to what he was doing he would probably have been
angered against himself and against her; and the direction of
Susan Lenox's life would certainly have been changed. Those who
fancy the human animal is in the custody of some conscious and
predetermining destiny think with their vanity rather than with
their intelligence. A careful look at any day or even hour of
any life reveals the inevitable influence of sheer accidents,
most of them trivial. And these accidents, often the most
trivial, most powerfully determine not only the direction but
also the degree and kind of force--what characteristics shall
develop and what shall dwindle.

"You seem to have a nut on you," said the box manufacturer at
the end of the examination. "I'll start you at three."

Susan, thus suddenly "placed" in the world and ticketed with a
real value, was so profoundly excited that she could not even
make a stammering attempt at expressing gratitude.

"Do your work well," continued Matson, "and you'll have a good
steady job with me till you get some nice young fellow to
support you. Stand the boys off. Don't let 'em touch you till
you're engaged--and not much then till the preacher's said the word."

"Thank you," said Susan, trying to look grave. She was
fascinated by his curious habit of scratching himself as he
talked--head, ribs, arm, legs, the backs of his red hairy hands.

"Stand 'em off," pursued the box-maker, scratching his ribs and
nodding his huge head vigorously. "That's the way my wife got
me. It's pull Dick pull devil with the gals and the boys. And
the gal that's stiff with the men gets a home, while her that
ain't goes to the streets. I always gives my gals a word of good
advice. And many a one I've saved. There's mighty few preachers
does as much good as me. When can you go to work?"

Susan reflected. With heightened color and a slight stammer she
said, "I've got something to do this afternoon, if you'll let
me. Can I come in the morning?"
"Seven sharp. We take off a cent a minute up to a quarter of an
hour. If you're later than that, you get docked for the day. And
no excuses. I didn't climb to the top from spittoon cleaner in
a saloon fifteen years ago by being an easy mark for my hands."

"I'll come at seven in the morning," said Susan.

"Do you live far?"

"I'm going to live just up the street."

"That's right. It adds ten cents a day to your wages--the ten
you'll save in carfare. Sixty cents a week!" And Matson beamed
and scratched as if he felt he had done a generous act. "Who are
you livin' with? Respectable, I hope."

"With Miss Brashear--I think."

"Oh, yes--Tom Brashear's gal. They're nice people. Tom's an
honest fellow--used to make good money till he had his hard
luck. Him and me used to work together. But he never could seem
to learn that it ain't workin' for yourself but makin' others
work for you that climbs a man up. I never was much as a worker.
I was always thinkin' out ways of makin' people work for me. And
here I am at the top. And where's Tom? Well--run along
now--what's your name?"

"Lorna Sackville."

"Lorny." He burst into a loud guffaw. "Lord, what a name! Sounds
like a theayter. Seven sharp, Lorny. So long."

Susan nodded with laughing eyes, thanked him and departed. She
glanced up the street, saw Etta standing in the door of the
restaurant. Etta did not move from her own doorway, though she
was showing every sign of anxiety and impatience. "I can't leave
even for a minute so near the dinner hour," she explained when
Susan came, "or I'd, a' been outside the factory. And ma's got
to stick to the kitchen. I see you got a job. How much?"

"Three," replied Susan.

"He must have offered it to you," said Etta, laughing. "I
thought about it after you were gone and I knew you'd take
whatever he said first. Oh, I've been so scared something'd
happen. I do want you as my lady friend. Was he fresh?"

"Not a bit. He was--very nice."

"Well, he ought to be nice--as pa says, getting richer and
richer, and driving the girls he robs to marry men they hate or
to pick up a living in the gutter."

Susan felt that she owed her benefactor a strong protest. "Maybe
I'm foolish," said she, "but I'm awful glad he's got that place
and can give me work."

Etta was neither convinced nor abashed. "You don't understand
things in our class," replied she. "Pa says it was the kind of
grateful thinking and talking you've just done that's made him
poor in his old age. He says you've either got to whip or be
whipped, rob or be robbed--and that the really good honest
people are the fools who take the losing side. But he says, too,
he'd rather be a fool and a failure than stoop to stamping on
his fellow-beings and robbing them. And I guess he's
right"--there Etta laughed--"though I'll admit I'd hate to be
tempted with a chance to get up by stepping on somebody." She
sighed. "And sometimes I can't help wishing pa had done some
tramping and stamping. Why not? That's all most people are fit
for--to be tramped and stamped on. Now, don't look so shocked.
You don't understand. Wait till you've been at work a while."

Susan changed the subject. "I'm going to work at seven in the
morning. . . . I might as well have gone today. I had a kind of
an engagement I thought I was going to keep, but I've about
decided I won't."

Etta watched with awe and delight the mysterious look in Susan's
suddenly flushed face and abstracted eyes. After a time she
ventured to interrupt with:

"You'll try living with us?"

"If you're quite sure--did you talk to your mother?"

"Mother'll be crazy about you. She wants anything that'll make
me more contented. Oh, I do get so lonesome!"

Mrs. Brashear, a spare woman, much bent by monotonous
work--which, however, had not bent her courage or her
cheerfulness--made Susan feel at home immediately in the little
flat. The tenement was of rather a superior class. But to Susan
it seemed full of noisome smells, and she was offended by the
halls littered with evidences of the uncleanness of the tenants.
She did not then realize that the apparent superior cleanness
and neatness of the better-off classes was really in large part
only affected, that their secluded back doors and back ways gave
them opportunity to hide their uncivilized habits from the world
that saw only the front. However, once inside the Brashear flat,
she had an instant rise of spirits.

"Isn't this nice?" exclaimed she as Etta showed her, at a glance
from the sitting-room, the five small but scrupulously clean
rooms. "I'll like it here!"

Etta reddened, glanced at her for signs of mockery, saw that she
was in earnest. "I'm afraid it's better to look at than to live
in," she began, then decided against saying anything discouraging.
"It seems cramped to us," said she, "after the house we had till
a couple of years ago. I guess we'll make out, somehow."

The family paid twenty dollars a month for the flat. The
restaurant earned twelve to fifteen a week; and the son, Ashbel,
stocky, powerful and stupid, had a steady job as porter at ten
a week. He gave his mother seven, as he had a room to himself
and an enormous appetite. He talked of getting married; if he
did marry, the family finances would be in disorder. But his
girl had high ideas, being the daughter of a grocer who fancied
himself still an independent merchant though he was in fact the
even more poorly paid selling agent of the various food products
trusts. She had fixed twenty a week as the least on which she
would marry; his prospects of any such raise were--luckily for
his family--extremely remote; for he had nothing but physical
strength to sell, and the price of physical strength alone was
going down, under immigrant competition, not only in actual wages
like any other form of wage labor, but also in nominal wages.

Altogether, the Brashears were in excellent shape for a tenement
family, were better off than upwards of ninety per cent of the
families of prosperous and typical Cincinnati. While it was true
that old Tom Brashear drank, it was also true that he carefully
limited himself to two dollars a week. While it was true that he
could not work at his trade and apparently did little but sit
round and talk--usually high above his audience--nevertheless he
was the actual head of the family and its chief bread-winner. It
was his savings that were invested in the restaurant; he bought
the supplies and was shrewd and intelligent about that vitally
important department of the business--the department whose
mismanagement in domestic economy is, next to drink, the main
cause of failure and pauperism, of sickness, of premature
disability, of those profound discouragements that lead to
despair. Also, old Brashear had the sagacity and the nagging
habit that are necessary to keeping people and things up to the
mark. He had ideas--practical ideas as well as ideals--far above
his station. But for him the housekeeping would have been in the
familiar tenement fashion of slovenliness and filth, and the
family would have been neat only on Sundays, and only on the
surface then. Because he had the habit of speaking of himself as
useless, as done for, as a drag, as one lingering on when he
ought to be dead, his family and all the neighborhood thought of
him in that way. Although intelligence, indeed, virtue of every
kind, is expected of tenement house people--and is needed by
them beyond any other condition of humanity--they are
unfortunately merely human, are tainted of all human weaknesses.
They lack, for instance, discrimination. So, it never occurred
to them that Tom Brashear was the sole reason why the Brashears
lived better than any of the other families and yielded less to
the ferocious and incessant downward pressure.

But for one thing the Brashears would have been going up in the
world. That thing was old Tom's honesty. The restaurant gave
good food and honest measure. Therefore, the margin of profit
was narrow--too narrow. He knew what was the matter. He mocked
at himself for being "such a weak fool" when everybody else with
the opportunity and the intelligence was getting on by yielding
to the compulsion of the iron rule of dishonesty in business.
But he remained honest--therefore, remained in the working
class, instead of rising among its exploiters.

"If I didn't drink, I'd kill myself," said old Tom to Susan,
when he came to know her well and to feel that from her he could
get not the mere blind admiration the family gave him but
understanding and sympathy. "Whenever anybody in the working
class has any imagination," he explained, "he either kicks his
way out of it into capitalist or into criminal--or else he takes
to drink. I ain't mean enough to be either a capitalist or a
criminal. So, I've got to drink."

Susan only too soon began to appreciate from her own experience
what he meant.

In the first few days the novelty pleased her, made her think
she was going to be contented. The new friends and
acquaintances, different from any she had known, the new sights,
the new way of living--all this interested her, even when it
shocked one or many of her senses and sensibilities. But the
novelty of folding and pasting boxes, of the queer new kind of
girls who worked with her, hardly survived into the second week.
She saw that she was among a people where the highest known
standard--the mode of life regarded by them as the acme of
elegance and bliss--the best they could conceive was far, far
below what she had been brought up to believe the scantest
necessities of respectable and civilized living. She saw this
life from the inside now--as the comfortable classes never permit
themselves to see it if they can avoid. She saw that to be a
contented working girl, to look forward to the prospect of being
a workingman's wife, a tenement housekeeper and mother, a woman
must have been born to it--and born with little brains--must
have been educated for it, and for nothing else. Etta was
bitterly discontented; yet after all it was a vague endurable
discontent. She had simply heard of and dreamed of and from afar
off--chiefly through novels and poems and the theater--had
glimpsed a life that was broader, that had comfort and luxury,
people with refined habits and manners. Susan had not merely
heard of such a life; she had lived it--it, and no other.

Always of the thoughtful temperament, she had been rapidly
developed first by Burlingham and now by Tom Brashear--had been
taught not only how to think but also how to gather the things
to think about.

With a few exceptions the girls at the factory were woefully
unclean about their persons. Susan did not blame them; she only
wondered at Etta the more, and grew to admire her--and the
father who held the whole family up to the mark. For, in spite
of the difficulties of getting clean, without bathtub, without
any but the crudest and cheapest appliances for cleanliness,
without any leisure time, Etta kept herself in perfect order.
The show boat and the quarters at the hotel had been trying to
Susan. But they had seemed an adventure, a temporary, passing
phase, a sort of somewhat prolonged camping-out lark. Now, she
was settled down, to live, apparently for the rest of her life,
with none of the comforts, with few of the decencies. What Etta
and her people, using all their imagination, would have pictured
as the pinnacle of luxury would have been for Susan a small and
imperfect part of what she had been bred to regard as "living
decently." She suspected that but for Etta's example she would
be yielding, at least in the matter of cleanliness, when the
struggle against dirt was so unequal, was thankless.
Discouragement became her frequent mood; she wondered if the
time would not come when it would be her fixed habit, as it was
with all but a handful of those about her.

Sometimes she and Etta walked in the quarter at the top of the
hill where lived the families of prosperous
merchants--establishments a little larger, a little more
pretentious than her Uncle George's in Sutherland, but on the
whole much like it--the houses of the solid middle class which
fancies itself grandly luxurious where it is in fact merely
comfortable in a crude unimaginative way. Susan was one of those
who are born with the instinct and mental bent for luxurious
comfort; also, she had the accompanying peculiar talent for
assimilating ideas about food and dress and surroundings from
books and magazines, from the study of well-dressed people in
the street, from glances into luxurious interiors through
windows or open doors as she passed by. She saw with even
quicker and more intelligently critical eyes the new thing, the
good idea, the improvement on what she already knew. Etta's
excitement over these commonplace rich people amused her. She
herself, on the wings of her daring young fancy, could soar into
a realm of luxury, of beauty and exquisite comfort, that made
these self-complacent mansions seem very ordinary indeed. It was
no drag upon her fancy, but the reverse, that she was sharing a
narrow bed and a narrow room in a humble and tiny tenement flat.

On one of these walks Etta confided to her the only romance of
her life therefore the real cause of her deep discontent. It was
a young man from one of these houses--a flirtation lasting about
a year. She assured Susan it was altogether innocent.
Susan--perhaps chiefly because Etta protested so insistently
about her unsullied purity--had her doubts.

"Then," said Etta, "when I saw that he didn't care anything
about me except in one way--I didn't see him any more. I--I've
been sorry ever since."

Susan did not offer the hoped-for sympathy. She was silent.

"Did you ever have anything like that happen to you?" inquired Etta.

"Yes," said Susan. "Something like that."

"And what did you do?"

"I didn't want to see him any more."

"Why?"

"I don't know--exactly.

"And you like him?"

"I think I would have liked him."

"You're sorry you stopped?"

"Sometimes," replied she, hesitatingly.

She was beginning to be afraid that she would soon be sorry all
the time. Every day the war within burst forth afresh. She
reproached herself for her growing hatred of her life. Ought she
not to be grateful that she had so much--that she was not one of
a squalid quartette in a foul, vermin-infested back
bedroom--infested instead of only occasionally visited--that she
was not a streetwalker, diseased, prowling in all weathers, the
prey of the coarse humors of contemptuous and usually drunken
beasts; that she was not living where everyone about her would,
by pity or out of spitefulness, tear open the wounds of that
hideous brand which had been put upon her at birth? Above all,
she ought to be thankful that she was not Jeb Ferguson's wife.

But her efforts to make herself resigned and contented, to kill
her doubts as to the goodness of "goodness," were not
successful. She had Tom Brashear's "ungrateful" nature--the
nature that will not let a man or a woman stay in the class of
hewers of wood and drawers of water but drives him or her out of
it--and up or down.

"You're one of those that things happen to," the old
cabinetmaker said to her on a September evening, as they sat on
the sidewalk in front of the restaurant. The tenements had
discharged their swarms into the hot street, and there was that
lively panorama of dirt and disease and depravity which is
fascinating--to unaccustomed eyes. "Yes," said Tom, "things'll
happen to you."

"What--for instance?" she asked.

"God only knows. You'll up and do something some day. You're
settin' here just to grow wings. Some day--swish!--and off you'll
soar. It's a pity you was born female. Still--there's a lot of
females that gets up. Come to think of it, I guess sex don't
matter. It's havin' the soul--and mighty few of either sex has it."

"Oh, I'm like everybody else," said the girl with an impatient
sigh. "I dream, but--it doesn't come to anything."

"No, you ain't like everybody else," retorted he, with a
positive shake of his finely shaped head, thatched superbly with
white hair. "You ain't afraid, for instance. That's the
principal sign of a great soul, I guess."

"Oh, but I _am_ afraid," cried Susan. "I've only lately found out
what a coward I am."

"You think you are," said the cabinetmaker. "There's them that's
afraid to do, and don't do. Then there's them that's afraid to
do, but goes ahead and does anyhow. That's you. I don't know
where you came from--oh, I heard Etta's accountin' for you to
her ma, but that's neither here nor there. I don't know where
you come from, and I don't know where you're going. But--you
ain't afraid--and you have imagination--and those two signs
means something doing."

Susan shook her head dejectedly; it had been a cruelly hard day
at the factory and the odors from the girls working on either
side of her had all but overwhelmed her.

Old Tom nodded with stronger emphasis. "You're too young, yet,"
he said. "And not licked into shape. But wait a while. You'll
get there."

Susan hoped so, but doubted it. There was no time to work at
these large problems of destiny when the daily grind was so
compelling, so wearing, when the problems of bare food, clothing
and shelter took all there was in her.

For example, there was the matter of clothes. She had come with
only what she was wearing. She gave the Brashears every Saturday
two dollars and a half of her three and was ashamed of herself
for taking so much for so little, when she learned about the
cost of living and how different was the food the Brashears had
from that of any other family in those quarters! As soon as she
had saved four dollars from her wages--it took nearly two
months--she bought the necessary materials and made herself two
plain outer skirts, three blouses and three pairs of drawers.
Chemises and corset covers she could not afford. She bought a
pair of shoes for a dollar, two pairs of stockings for thirty
cents, a corset for eighty cents, an umbrella for half a dollar,
two underwaists for a quarter. She bought an untrimmed hat for
thirty-five cents and trimmed it with the cleaned ribbon from
her summer sailor and a left over bit of skirt material. She
also made herself a jacket that had to serve as wrap too--and
the materials for this took the surplus of her wages for another
month. The cold weather had come, and she had to walk fast when
she was in the open air not to be chilled to the bone. Her Aunt
Fanny had been one of those women, not too common in America,
who understand and practice genuine economy in the
household--not the shabby stinginess that passes for economy but
the laying out of money to the best advantage that comes only
when one knows values. This training stood Susan in good stead
now. It saved her from disaster--from disintegration.

She and Etta did some washing every night, hanging the things on
the fire escape to dry. In this way she was able to be clean;
but in appearance she looked as poor as she was. She found a
cobbler who kept her shoes in fair order for a few cents; but
nothing was right about them soon--except that they were not
down at the heel. She could recall how she had often wondered
why the poor girls at Sutherland showed so little taste, looked
so dowdy. She wondered at her own stupidity, at the narrowness
of an education, such as hers had been, an education that left
her ignorant of the conditions of life as it was lived by all
but a lucky few of her fellow beings.

How few the lucky! What an amazing world--what a strange
creation the human race! How was it possible that the lucky few,
among whom she had been born and bred, should know so little,
really nothing, about the lot of the vast mass of their fellows,
living all around them, close up against them? "If I had only
known!" she thought. And then she reflected that, if she had
known, pleasure would have been impossible. She could see her
bureau drawers, her closets at home. She had thought herself not
any too well off. Now, how luxurious, how stuffed with shameful,
wasteful unnecessaries those drawers and closets seemed!

And merely to keep herself in underclothes that were at least
not in tatters she had to spend every cent over and above her
board. If she had had to pay carfare ten cents a day, sixty
cents a week!--as did many of the girls who lived at home, she
would have been ruined. She understood now why every girl
without a family back of her, and without good prospect of
marriage, was revolving the idea of becoming a streetwalker--not
as a hope, but as a fear. As she learned to observe more
closely, she found good reasons for suspecting that from time to
time the girls who became too hard pressed relieved the tension
by taking to the streets on Saturday and Sunday nights. She read
in the _Commercial_ one noon--Mr. Matson sometimes left his paper
where she could glance through it--she read an article on
working girls, how they were seduced to lives of shame--by love
of _finery_! Then she read that those who did not fall were
restrained by religion and innate purity. There she
laughed--bitterly. Fear of disease, fear of maternity, yes. But
where was this religion? Who but the dullest fools in the throes
of that bare and tortured life ever thought of God? As for the
purity--what about the obscene talk that made her shudder
because of its sheer filthy stupidity?--what about the frank
shamelessness of the efforts to lure their "steadies" into
speedy matrimony by using every charm of caress and of person to
inflame passion without satisfying it? She had thought she knew
about the relations of the sexes when she came to live and work
in that tenement quarter. Soon her knowledge had seemed
ignorance beside the knowledge of the very babies.

It was a sad, sad puzzle. If one ought to be good--chaste and
clean in mind and body--then, why was there the most tremendous
pressure on all but a few to make them as foul as the
surroundings in which they were compelled to live? If it was
wiser to be good, then why were most people imprisoned in a life
from which they could escape only by being bad? What was this
thing comfortable people had set up as good, anyhow--and what
was bad? She found no answer. How could God condemn anyone for
anything they did in the torments of the hell that life revealed
itself to her as being, after a few weeks of its moral, mental
and physical horrors? Etta's father was right; those who
realized what life really was and what it might be, those who
were sensitive took to drink or went to pieces some other way,
if they were gentle, and if they were cruel, committed any
brutality, any crime to try to escape.

In former days Susan thought well of charity, as she had been
taught. Old Tom Brashear gave her a different point of view. One
day he insulted and drove from the tenement some pious
charitable people who had come down from the fashionable hilltop
to be good and gracious to their "less fashionable
fellow-beings." After they had gone he explained his harshness
to Susan:

"That's the only way you can make them slickedup brutes feel,"
said he, "they're so thick in the hide and satisfied with
themselves. What do they come here for! To do good! Yes--to
themselves. To make themselves feel how generous and sweet they
was. Well, they'd better go home and read their Russia-leather
covered Bibles. They'd find out that when God wanted to really
do something for man, he didn't have himself created a king, or
a plutocrat, or a fat, slimy church deacon in a fashionable
church. No, he had himself born a bastard in a manger."

Susan shivered, for the truth thus put sounded like sacrilege.
Then a glow--a glow of pride and of hope--swept through her.

"If you ever get up into another class," went on old Tom, "don't
come hangin' round the common people you'll be livin' off of and
helpin' to grind down; stick to your own class. That's the only
place anybody can do any good--any real helpin' and lovin', man
to man, and woman to woman. If you want to help anybody that's
down, pull him up into your class first. Stick to your class.
You'll find plenty to do there."

"What, for instance?" asked Susan. She understood a little of
what he had in mind, but was still puzzled.

"Them stall-fed fakers I just threw out," the old man went on.
"They come here, actin' as if this was the Middle Ages and the
lord of the castle was doin' a fine thing when he went down
among the low peasants who'd been made by God to work for the
lords. But this ain't the Middle Ages. What's the truth about it?"

"I don't know," confessed Susan.

"Why, the big lower class is poor because the little upper class
takes away from 'em and eats up all they toil and slave to make.
Oh, it ain't the upper class's fault. They do it because they're
ignorant more'n because they're bad, just as what goes on down
here is ignorance more'n badness. But they do it, all the same.
And they're ignorant and need to be told. Supposin' you saw a
big girl out yonder in the street beatin' her baby sister. What
would you do? Would you go and hold out little pieces of candy
to the baby and say how sorry you was for her? Or would you
first grab hold of that big sister and throw her away from
beatin' of the baby?"

"I see," said Susan.

"That's it exactly," exclaimed the old man, in triumph. "And I
say to them pious charity fakers, `Git the hell out of here
where you can't do no good. Git back to yer own class that makes
all this misery, makes it faster'n all the religion and charity
in the world could help it. Git back to yer own class and work
with them, and teach them and make them stop robbin' and beatin'
the baby.'"

"Yes," said the girl, "you are right. I see it now. But, Mr.
Brashear, they meant well."

"The hell they did," retorted the old man. "If they'd, a' had
love in their hearts, they'd have seen the truth. Love's one of
the greatest teachers in the world. If they'd, a' meant well,
they'd, a' been goin' round teachin' and preachin' and prayin'
at their friends and fathers and brothers, the plutocrats.
They'd never 'a' come down here, pretendin' they was doin' good,
killin' one bedbug out of ten million and offerin' one pair of
good pants where a hundred thousand pairs is needed. They'd
better go read about themselves in their Bible--what Jesus says.
He knew 'em. _He_ belonged to _us_--and _they_ crucified him."

The horrors of that by no means lowest tenement region, its
horrors for a girl bred as Susan had been! Horrors moral,
horrors mental, horrors physical--above all, the physical
horrors; for, worse to her than the dull wits and the lack of
education, worse than vile speech and gesture, was the hopeless
battle against dirt, against the vermin that could crawl
everywhere--and did. She envied the ignorant and the insensible
their lack of consciousness of their own plight--like the
disemboweled horse that eats tranquilly on. At first she had
thought her unhappiness came from her having been used to better
things, that if she had been born to this life she would have
been content, gay at times. Soon she learned that laughter does
not always mean mirth; that the ignorant do not lack the power
to suffer simply because they lack the power to appreciate; that
the diseases, the bent bodies, the harrowed faces, the
drunkenness, quarreling, fighting, were safer guides to the real
conditions of these people than their occasional guffaws and
fits of horseplay.

A woman from the hilltop came in a carriage to see about a
servant. On her way through the hall she cried out: "Gracious!
Why don't these lazy creatures clean up, when soap costs so
little and water nothing at all!" Susan heard, was moved to face
her fiercely, but restrained herself. Of what use? How could the
woman understand, if she heard, "But, you fool, where are we to
get the time to clean up?--and where the courage?--and would soap
enough to clean up and keep clean cost so little, when every
penny means a drop of blood?"

"If they only couldn't drink so much!" said Susan to Tom.

"What, then?" retorted he. "Why, pretty soon wages'd be cut
faster than they was when street carfares went down from ten
cents to five. Whenever the workin' people arrange to live
cheaper and to try to save something, down goes wages. No, they
might as well drink. It helps 'em bear it and winds 'em up
sooner. I tell you, it ain't the workin' people's fault--it's
the bosses, now. It's the system--the system. A new form of
slavery, this here wage system--and it's got to go--like the
slaveholder that looked so copper-riveted and Bible-backed in
its day."

That idea of "the system" was beyond Susan. But not what her
eyes saw, and her ears heard, and her nose smelled, and her
sense of touch shrank from. No ambition and no reason for
ambition. No real knowledge, and no chance to get any--neither
the leisure nor the money nor the teachers. No hope, and no
reason for hope. No God--and no reason for a God.

Ideas beyond her years, beyond her comprehension, were stirring
in her brain, were making her grave and thoughtful. She was
accumulating a store of knowledge about life; she was groping
for the clew to its mystery, for the missing fact or facts which
would enable her to solve the puzzle, to see what its lessons
were for her. Sometimes her heavy heart told her that the
mystery was plain and the lesson easy--hopelessness. For of all
the sadness about her, of all the tragedies so sordid and
unromantic, the most tragic was the hopelessness. It would be
impossible to conceive people worse off; it would be impossible
to conceive _these_ people better off. They were such a
multitude that only they could save themselves--and they had no
intelligence to appreciate, no desire to impel. If their
miseries--miseries to which they had fallen heir at birth--had
made them what they were, it was also true that they were what
they were--hopeless, down to the babies playing in the filth. An
unscalable cliff; at the top, in pleasant lands, lived the
comfortable classes; at the bottom lived the masses--and while
many came whirling down from the top, how few found their way up!

On a Saturday night Ashbel came home with the news that his
wages had been cut to seven dollars. And the restaurant had been
paying steadily less as the hard times grew harder and the cost
of unadulterated and wholesome food mounted higher and higher.
As the family sat silent and stupefied, old Tom looked up from
his paper, fixed his keen, mocking eyes on Susan.

"I see, here," said he, "that _we_ are so rich that they want to
raise the President's salary so as he can entertain
_decently_--and to build palaces at foreign courts so as our
representatives'll live worthy of _us_!"

                          CHAPTER XX

ON Monday at the lunch hour--or, rather, halfhour--Susan
ventured in to see the boss.

Matson had too recently sprung from the working class and was
too ignorant of everything outside his business to have made
radical changes in his habits. He smoked five-cent cigars
instead of "twofurs"; he ate larger quantities of food, did not
stint himself in beer or in treating his friends in the evenings
down at Wielert's beer garden. Also he wore a somewhat better
quality of clothing; but he looked precisely what he was. Like
all the working class above the pauper line, he made a Sunday
toilet, the chief features of which were the weekly bath and the
weekly clean white shirt. Thus, it being only Monday morning, he
was looking notably clean when Susan entered--and was morally
wound up to a higher key than he would be as the week wore on.
At sight of her his feet on the leaf of the desk wavered, then
became inert; it would not do to put on manners with any of the
"hands." Thanks to the bath, he was not exuding his usual odor
that comes from bolting much strong, cheap food.

"Well, Lorny--what's the kick?" inquired he with his amiable
grin. His rise in the world never for an instant ceased to be a
source of delight to him; it--and a perfect digestion--kept him
in a good humor all the time.

"I want to know," stammered Susan, "if you can't give me a
little more money."

He laughed, eyeing her approvingly. Her clothing was that of the
working girl; but in her face was the look never found in those
born to the modern form of slavery-wage servitude. If he had
been "cultured" he might have compared her to an enslaved
princess, though in fact that expression of her courageous
violet-gray eyes and sensitive mouth could never have been in
the face of princess bred to the enslaving routine of the most
conventional of conventional lives; it could come only from
sheer erectness of spirit, the exclusive birthright of the sons
and daughters of democracy.

"More money!" he chuckled. "You _have_ got a nerve!--when
factories are shutting down everywhere and working people are
tramping the streets in droves."

"I do about one-fourth more than the best hands you've got,"
replied Susan, made audacious by necessity. "And I'll agree to
throw in my lunch time."

"Let me see, how much do you get?"

"Three dollars."

"And you aren't living at home. You must have a hard time. Not
much over for diamonds, eh? You want to hustle round and get
married, Lorny. Looks don't last long when a gal works. But
you're holdin' out better'n them that gads and dances all night."

"I help at the restaurant in the evening to piece out my board.
I'm pretty tired when I get a chance to go to bed."

"I'll bet!. . . So, you want more money. I've been watchin'
you. I watch all my gals--I have to, to keep weedin' out the
fast ones. I won't have no bad examples in _my_ place! As soon as
I ketch a gal livin' beyond her wages I give her the bounce."

Susan lowered her eyes and her cheeks burned--not because Matson
was frankly discussing the frivolous subject of sex. Another
girl might have affected the air of distressed modesty, but it
would have been affectation, pure and simple, as in those
regions all were used to hearing the frankest, vilest
things--and we do not blush at what we are used to hearing.
Still, the tenement female sex is as full of affectation as is
the sex elsewhere. But, Susan, the curiously self-unconscious,
was incapable of affectation. Her indignation arose from her
sense of the hideous injustice of Matson's discharging girls for
doing what his meager wages all but compelled.

"Yes, I've been watching you," he went on, "with a kind of a
sort of a notion of makin' you a forelady. That'd mean six
dollars a week. But you ain't fit. You've got the brains--plenty
of 'em. But you wouldn't be of no use to me as forelady."

"Why not?" asked Susan. Six dollars a week! Affluence! Wealth!

Matson took his feet down, relit his cigar and swung himself
into an oracular attitude.

"I'll show you. What's manufacturin'? Right down at the bottom,
I mean." He looked hard at the girl. She looked receptively at him.

"Why, it's gettin' work out of the hands. New ideas is nothin'.
You can steal 'em the minute the other fellow uses 'em. No, it's
all in gettin' work out of the hands."

Susan's expression suggested one who sees light and wishes to
see more of it. He proceeded:

"You work for me--for instance, now, if every day you make stuff
there's a profit of five dollars on, I get five dollars out of
you. If I can push you to make stuff there's a profit of six
dollars on, I get six dollars--a dollar more. Clear extra gain,
isn't it? Now multiply a dollar by the number of hands, and
you'll see what it amounts to."

"I see," said Susan, nodding thoughtfully.

"Well! How did I get up? Because as a foreman I knew how to work
the hands. I knew how to get those extra dollars. And how do I
keep up? Because I hire forepeople that get work out of the hands."

Susan understood. But her expression was a comment that was not
missed by the shrewd Matson.

"Now, listen to me, Lorny. I want to give you a plain straight
talk because I'd like to see you climb. Ever since you've been
here I've been laughin' to myself over the way your
forelady--she's a fox, she is!--makes you the pacemaker for the
other girls. She squeezes at least twenty-five cents a day over
what she used to out of each hand in your room because you're
above the rest of them dirty, shiftless muttonheads."

Susan flushed at this fling at her fellow-workers.

"Dirty, shiftless muttonheads," repeated Matson. "Ain't I right?
Ain't they dirty? Ain't they shiftless--so no-account that if
they wasn't watched every minute they'd lay down--and let me and
the factory that supports 'em go to rack and ruin? And ain't
they muttonheads? Do you ever find any of 'em saying or doing a
sensible thing?"

Susan could not deny. She could think of excuses--perfect
excuses. But the facts were about as he brutally put it.

"Oh, I know 'em. I've dealt with 'em all my life," pursued the
box manufacturer. "Now, Lorny, you ought to be a forelady.
You've got to toughen up and stop bein' so polite and helpful
and all that. You'll _never_ get on if you don't toughen up.
Business is business. Be as sentimental as you like away from
business, and after you've clum to the top. But not _in_ business
or while you're kickin' and scratchin' and clawin' your way up."

Susan shook her head slowly. She felt painfully young and
inexperienced and unfit for the ferocious struggle called
life. She felt deathly sick.

"Of course it's a hard world," said Matson with a wave of his
cigar. "But did I make it?"

"No," admitted Susan, as his eyes demanded a reply.

"Sure not," said he. "And how's anybody to get up in it? Is
there any other way but by kickin' and stampin', eh?"

"None that I see," conceded Susan reluctantly.

"None that is," declared he. "Them that says there's other ways
either lies or don't know nothin' about the practical game.
Well, then!" Matson puffed triumphantly at the cigar. "Such
bein' the case--and as long as the crowd down below's got to be
kicked in the face by them that's on the way up, why shouldn't
I do the kickin'--which is goin' to be done anyhow--instead of
gettin' kicked? Ain't that sense?"

"Yes," admitted Susan. She sighed. "Yes," she repeated.

"Well--toughen up. Meanwhile, I'll raise you, to spur the others
on. I'll give you four a week." And he cut short her thanks with
an "Oh, don't mention it. I'm only doin' what's square--what
helps me as well as you. I want to encourage you. You don't
belong down among them cattle. Toughen up, Lorny. A girl with
a bank account gets the pick of the beaux." And he nodded a
dismissal.

Matson, and his hands, bosses and workers, brutal, brutalizing
each other more and more as they acted and reacted upon each
other. Where would it end?

She was in dire need of underclothes. Her undershirts were full
of holes from the rubbing of her cheap, rough corset; her
drawers and stockings were patched in several places--in fact,
she could not have worn the stockings had not her skirt now been
well below her shoetops. Also, her shoes, in spite of the money
she had spent upon them, were about to burst round the edges of
the soles. But she would not longer accept from the Brashears
what she regarded as charity.

"You more than pay your share, what with the work you do,"
protested Mrs. Brashear. "I'll not refuse the extra dollar
because I've simply got to take it. But I don't want to pertend."

The restaurant receipts began to fall with the increasing
hardness of the times among the working people. Soon it was down
to practically no profit at all--that is, nothing toward the
rent. Tom Brashear was forced to abandon his policy of honesty,
to do as all the other purveyors were doing--to buy cheap stuff
and to cheapen it still further. He broke abruptly with his
tradition and his past. It aged him horribly all in a few
weeks--but, at least, ruin was put off. Mrs. Brashear had to
draw twenty of the sixty-three dollars which were in the savings
bank against sickness. Funerals would be taken care of by the
burial insurance; each member of the family, including Susan,
had a policy. But sickness had to have its special fund; and it
was frequently drawn upon, as the Brashears knew no more than
their neighbors about hygiene, and were constantly catching the
colds of foolish exposure or indigestion and letting them
develop into fevers, bad attacks of rheumatism, stomach trouble,
backache all regarded by them as by their neighbors as a
necessary part of the routine of life. Those tenement people had
no more notion of self-restraint than had the "better classes"
whose self-indulgences maintain the vast army of doctors and
druggists. The only thing that saved Susan from all but an
occasional cold or sore throat from wet feet was eating little
through being unable to accustom herself to the fare that was
the best the Brashears could now afford--cheap food in cheap
lard, coarse and poisonous sugar, vilely adulterated coffee,
doctored meat and vegetables--the food which the poor in their
ignorance buy--and for which they in their helplessness pay
actually higher prices than do intelligent well-to-do people for
the better qualities. And not only were the times hard, but the
winter also. Snow--sleet--rain--thaw--slush--noisome,
disease-laden vapor--and, of course, sickness everywhere--with
occasional relief in death, relief for the one who died, relief
for the living freed from just so much of the burden. The
sickness on every hand appalled Susan. Surely, she said to old
Brashear, the like had never been before; on the contrary, said
he, the amount of illness and death was, if anything, less than
usual because the hard times gave people less for eating and
drinking. These ghastly creatures crawling toward the hospital
or borne out on stretchers to the ambulance--these yet ghastlier
creatures tottering feebly homeward, discharged as cured--these
corpses of men, of women, of boys and girls, of babies--oh, how
many corpses of babies!--these corpses borne away for burial,
usually to the public burying ground--all these stricken ones in
the battle ever waging, with curses, with hoarse loud laughter,
with shrieks and moans, with dull, drawn faces and jaws set--all
these stricken ones were but the ordinary losses of the battle!

"And in the churches," said old Tom Brashear, "they preach the
goodness and mercy of God. And in the papers they talk about how
rich and prosperous we are."

"I don't care to live! It is too horrible," cried the girl.

"Oh, you mustn't take things so to heart," counseled he. "Us
that live this life can't afford to take it to heart. Leave that
to them who come down here from the good houses and look on us
for a minute and enjoy themselves with a little weepin' and
sighin' as if it was in the theater."

"It seems worse every, day," she said. "I try to fool myself,
because I've got to stay and----"

"Oh, no, you haven't," interrupted he.

Susan looked at him with a startled expression. It seemed to her
that the old man had seen into her secret heart where was daily
raging the struggle against taking the only way out open to a
girl in her circumstances. It seemed to her he was hinting that
she ought to take that way.

If any such idea was in his mind, he did not dare put it into
words. He simply repeated:

"You won't stay. You'll pull out."

"How?" she asked.

"Somehow. When the way opens you'll see it, and take it."

There had long since sprung up between these two a sympathy, a
mutual understanding beyond any necessity of expression in words
or looks. She had never had this feeling for anyone, not even
for Burlingham. This feeling for each other had been like that
of a father and daughter who love each other without either
understanding the other very well or feeling the need of a
sympathetic understanding. There was a strong resemblance
between Burlingham and old Tom. Both belonged to the familiar
philosopher type. But, unlike the actor-manager, the old
cabinetmaker had lived his philosophy, and a very gentle and
tolerant philosophy it was.

After she had looked her request for light upon what way she was
to take, they sat silent, neither looking at the other, yet each
seeing the other with the eye of the mind. She said:

"I may not dare take it."

"You won't have no choice," replied he. "You'll have to take it.
And you'll get away from here. And you mustn't ever come
back--or look back. Forget all this misery. Rememberin' won't do
us no good. It'd only weaken you."

"I shan't ever forget," cried the girl.

"You must," said the old man firmly. He added, "And you will.
You'll have too much else to think about--too much that has to
be attended to."

As the first of the year approached and the small shopkeepers of
the tenements, like the big ones elsewhere, were casting up the
year's balances and learning how far toward or beyond the verge
of ruin the hard times had brought them, the sound of the fire
engines--and of the ambulances--became a familiar part of the
daily and nightly noises of the district. Desperate shopkeepers,
careless of their neighbors' lives and property in fiercely
striving for themselves and their families--workingmen out of a
job and deep in debt--landlords with too heavy interest falling
due--all these were trying to save themselves or to lengthen the
time the fact of ruin could be kept secret by setting fire to
their shops or their flats. The Brashears had been burned out
twice in their wandering tenement house life; so old Tom was
sleeping little; was constantly prowling about the halls of all
the tenements in that row and into the cellars.

He told Susan the open secret of the meaning of most of these
fires. And after he had cursed the fire fiends, he apologized
for them. "It's the curse of the system," explained he. "It's
all the curse of the system. These here storekeepers and the
farmers the same way--they think they're independent, but really
they're nothin' but fooled slaves of the big blood suckers for
the upper class. But these here little storekeepers, they're
tryin' to escape. How does a man escape? Why, by gettin' some
hands together to work for him so that he can take it out of their
wages. When you get together enough to hire help--that's when you
pass out of slavery into the master class--master of slaves."

Susan nodded understandingly.

"Now, how can these little storekeepers like me get together
enough to begin to hire slaves? By a hundred tricks, every one
of them wicked and mean. By skimpin' and slavin' themselves and
their families, by sellin' short weight, by sellin' rotten food,
by sellin' poison, by burnin' to get the insurance. And, at
last, if they don't die or get caught and jailed, they get
together the money to branch out and hire help, and begin to get
prosperous out of the blood of their help. These here arson
fellows--they're on the first rung of the ladder of success. You
heard about that beautiful ladder in Sunday school, didn't you?"

"Yes," said Susan, "that and a great many other lies about God
and man."

Susan had all along had great difficulty in getting sleep
because of the incessant and discordant noises of the district.
The unhappy people added to their own misery by disturbing each
other's rest--and no small part of the bad health everywhere
prevailing was due to this inability of anybody to get proper
sleep because somebody was always singing or quarreling,
shouting or stamping about. But Susan, being young and as yet
untroubled by the indigestion that openly or secretly preyed
upon everyone else, did at last grow somewhat used to noise, did
contrive to get five or six hours of broken sleep. With the
epidemic of fires she was once more restless and wakeful. Every
day came news of fire somewhere in the tenement districts of the
city, with one or more, perhaps a dozen, roasted to death, or
horribly burned. A few weeks, however, and even that peril
became so familiar that she slept like the rest. There were too
many actualities of discomfort, of misery, to harass her all day
long every time her mind wandered from her work.

One night she was awakened by a scream. She leaped from bed to
find the room filling with smoke and the street bright as day,
but with a flickering evil light. Etta was screaming, Ashbel was
bawling and roaring like a tortured bull. Susan, completely
dazed by the uproar, seized Etta and dragged her into the hall.
There were Mr. and Mrs. Brashear, he in his nightdress of
drawers and undershirt, she in the short flannel petticoat and
sacque in which she always slept. Ashbel burst out of his room,
kicking the door down instead of turning the knob.

"Lorny," cried old Tom, "you take mother and Etta to the
escape." And he rushed at his powerful, stupid son and began to
strike him in the face with his one good fist, shrieking, "Shut
up, you damn fool! Shut up!"

Dragging Etta and pushing Mrs. Brashear, Susan moved toward the
end of the hall where the fire escape passed their windows. All
the way down, the landings were littered with bedding, pots,
pans, drying clothes, fire wood, boxes, all manner of rubbish,
the overflow of the crowded little flats. Over these
obstructions and down the ladders were falling and stumbling
men, women, children, babies, in all degrees of nudity--for many
of the big families that slept in one room with windows tight
shut so that the stove heat would not escape and be wasted when
fuel was so dear, slept stark naked. Susan contrived to get
Etta and the old woman to the street; not far behind them came
Tom and Ashbel, the son's face bleeding from the blows his
father had struck to quiet him.

It was a penetrating cold night, with an icy drizzle falling.
The street was filled with engines, hose, all manner of ruined
household effects, firemen shouting, the tenement people
huddling this way and that, barefooted, nearly or quite naked,
silent, stupefied. Nobody had saved anything worth while. The
entire block was ablaze, was burning as if it had been saturated
with coal oil.

"The owner's done this," said old Tom. "I heard he was in
trouble. But though he's a church member and what they call a
philanthropist, I hardly thought he'd stoop to hirin' this
done. If anybody's caught, it'll be some fellow that don't know
who he did it for."

About a hundred families were homeless in the street. Half a
dozen patrol wagons and five ambulances were taking the people
away to shelter, women and babies first. It was an hour--an hour
of standing in the street, with bare feet on the ice, under the
ankledeep slush--before old Tom and his wife got their turn to
be taken. Then Susan and Etta and Ashbel, escorted by a
policeman, set out for the station house. As they walked along,
someone called out to the policeman:

"Anybody killed at the fire, officer?"

"Six jumped and was smashed," replied the policeman. "I seen
three dead babies. But they won't know for several days how many
it'll total."

And all her life long, whenever Susan Lenox heard the clang of
a fire engine, there arose before her the memory picture of that
fire, in all the horror of detail. A fire bell to her meant
wretched families flung into the night, shrieks of mangled and
dying, moans of babies with life oozing from their blue lips,
columns of smoke ascending through icy, soaking air, and a vast
glare of wicked light with flame demons leaping for joy in the
measureless woe over which they were presiding. As the little
party was passing the fire lines, Ashbel's foot slipped on a
freezing ooze of blood and slush, and he fell sprawling upon a
human body battered and trampled until it was like an overturned
basket of butcher's odds and ends.

The station house was eleven long squares away. But before they
started for it they were already at the lowest depth of physical
wretchedness which human nerves can register; thus, they
arrived simply a little more numb. The big room, heated by a
huge, red-hot stove to the point where the sweat starts, was
crowded with abject and pitiful human specimens. Even Susan, the
most sensitive person there, gazed about with stolid eyes. The
nakedness of unsightly bodies, gross with fat or wasted to
emaciation, the dirtiness of limbs and torsos long, long
unwashed, the foul steam from it all and from the water-soaked
rags, the groans of some, the silent, staring misery of others,
and, most horrible of all, the laughter of those who yielded
like animals to the momentary sense of physical well-being as
the heat thawed them out--these sights and sounds together made
up a truly infernal picture. And, like all the tragedies of
abject poverty, it was wholly devoid of that dignity which is
necessary to excite the deep pity of respect, was sordid and
squalid, moved the sensitive to turn away in loathing rather
than to advance with brotherly sympathy and love.

Ashbel, his animal instinct roused by the sight of the stove,
thrust the throng aside rudely as he pushed straight for the
radiating center. Etta and Susan followed in his wake. The
fierce heat soon roused them to the sense of their plight.
Ashbel began to curse, Etta to weep. Susan's mind was staring,
without hope but also without despair, at the walls of the trap
in which they were all caught--was seeking the spot where they
could begin to burrow through and escape.

Beds and covers were gathered in by the police from everywhere
in that district, were ranged upon the floor of the four rooms.
The men were put in the cells downstairs; the women and the
children got the cots. Susan and Etta lay upon the same
mattress, a horse blanket over them. Etta slept; Susan, wide
awake, lived in brain and nerves the heart-breaking scenes
through which she had passed numb and stolid.

About six o'clock a breakfast of coffee, milk and bread was
served. It was evident that the police did not know what to do
with these outcasts who had nothing and no place to go--for
practically all were out of work when the blow came. Ashbel
demanded shoes, pants and a coat.

"I've got to get to my job," shouted he, "or else I'll lose it.
Then where in the hell'd we be!"

His blustering angered the sergeant, who finally told him if he
did not quiet down he would be locked in a cell. Susan
interrupted, explained the situation, got Ashbel the necessary
clothes and freed Etta and herself of his worse than useless
presence. At Susan's suggestion such other men as had jobs were
also fitted out after a fashion and sent away. "You can take the
addresses of their families if you send them anywhere during the
day, and these men can come back here and find out where they've
gone----" this was the plan she proposed to the captain, and he
adopted it. As soon as the morning papers were about the city,
aid of every kind began to pour in, with the result that before
noon many of the families were better established than they had
been before the fire.

Susan and Etta got some clothing, enough to keep them warm on
their way through the streets to the hospital to which Brashear
and his wife had been taken. Mrs. Brashear had died in the
ambulance--of heart disease, the doctors said, but Susan felt it
was really of the sense that to go on living was impossible. And
fond of her though she was, she could not but be relieved that
there was one less factor in the unsolvable problem.

"She's better, off" she said to Etta in the effort to console.

But Etta needed no consolation. "Ever so much better off," she
promptly assented. "Mother hasn't cared about living since we
had to give up our little home and become tenement house people.
And she was right."

As to Brashear, they learned that he was ill; but they did not
learn until evening that he was dying of pneumonia. The two
girls and Ashbel were admitted to the ward where he lay--one of
a long line of sufferers in bare, clean little beds. Screens
were drawn round his bed because he was dying. He had been
suffering torments from the savage assaults of the pneumonia;
but the pain had passed away now, so he said, though the
dreadful sound of his breathing made Susan's heart flutter and
her whole body quiver.

"Do you want a preacher or a priest?" asked the nurse.

"Neither," replied the old man in gasps and whispers. "If there
is a God he'll never let anybody from this hell of a world into
his presence. They might tell him the truth about himself."

"Oh, father, father!" pleaded Etta, and Ashbel burst into a fit
of hysterical and terrified crying.

The old man turned his dying eyes on Susan. He rested a few
minutes, fixing her gaze upon his with a hypnotic stare. Then he
began again:

"You've got somethin' more'n a turnip on your shoulders. Listen
to me. There was a man named Jesus once"--gasp--gasp--"You've
heard about him, but you don't know about
him"--gasp--gasp--"I'll tell you--listen. He was a low fellow--a
workin' man--same trade as mine--born without a father--born in
a horse trough--in a stable"--gasp--gasp--

Susan leaned forward. "Born without a father," she murmured, her
eyes suddenly bright.

"That's him. Listen"--gasp--gasp--gasp--"He was a big
feller--big brain--big heart--the biggest man that ever
lived"--gasp--gasp--gasp--gas--"And he looked at this here hell
of a world from the outside, he being an outcast and a low-down
common workingman. And he _saw_--he did----

"Yes, he saw!"--gasp--gasp--gasp--"And he said all men were
brothers--and that they'd find it out some day. He saw that this
world was put together for the strong and the cruel--that they
could win out--and make the rest of us work for 'em for what they
chose to give--like they work a poor ignorant horse for his feed
and stall in a dirty stable----"gasp--gasp--gasp--

"For the strong and the cruel," said Susan.

"And this feller Jesus--he set round the saloons and such
places--publicans, they called 'em"--gasp--gasp--gasp--"And he
says to all the poor ignorant slaves and such cattle, he says,
`You're all brothers. Love one another'"--gasp--gasp--gasp--"
`Love one another,' he says, `and learn to help each other and
stand up for each other,' he says, `and hate war and fightin'
and money grabbin'----'"gasp--gasp--gasp--"`Peace on earth,' he
says, `Know the truth, and the truth shall make you free'--and
he saw there'd be a time"--the old man raised himself on one
elbow--"Yes, by God--there _will_ be!--a time when men'll learn
not to be beasts and'll be men--_men_, little gal!"

"Men," echoed Susan, her eyes shining, her bosom heaving.

"It ain't sense and it ain't right that everything should be for
the few--for them with brains--and that the rest--the
millions--should be tramped down just because they ain't so
cruel or so `cute'--they and their children tramped down in the
dirt. And that feller Jesus saw it."

"Yes--yes," cried Susan. "He saw it."

"I'll tell you what he was," said old Tom in a hoarse whisper.
"He wasn't no god. He was bigger'n that--bigger'n that, little
gal! He was the first _man_ that ever lived. He said, `Give the
weak a chance so as they kin git strong.' He says----"

The dying man fell back exhausted. His eyes rolled wildly,
closed; his mouth twitched, fell wide open; there came from his
throat a sound Susan had never heard before, but she knew what
it was, what it meant.

Etta and Ashbel were overwhelmed afresh by the disgrace of
having their parents buried in Potter's Field--for the insurance
money went for debts. They did not understand when Susan said,
"I think your father'd have liked to feel that he was going to
be buried there--because then he'll be with--with his Friend.
You know, _He_ was buried in Potter's Field." However, their
grief was shortlived; there is no time in the lives of working
people for such luxuries as grief--no more time than there is at
sea when all are toiling to keep afloat the storm-racked sinking
ship and one sailor is swept overboard. In comfortable lives a
bereavement is a contrast; in the lives of the wretched it is
but one more in the assailing army of woes.

Etta took a job at the box factory at three dollars a week; she
and Susan and Ashbel moved into two small rooms in a flat in a
tenement opposite the factory--a cheaper and therefore lower
house than the one that had burned. They bought on the
installment plan nine dollars' worth of furniture--the scant
minimum of necessities. They calculated that, by careful saving,
they could pay off the debt in a year or so--unless one or the
other fell ill or lost work. "That means," said Etta, eyeing
their flimsy and all but downright worthless purchases, "that
means we'll still be paying when this furniture'll be gone to
pieces and fit only for kindling."

"It's the best we can do," replied Susan. "Maybe one of us'll
get a better job."

"_You_ could, I'm sure, if you had the clothes," said Etta. "But
not in those rags."

"If I had the clothes? Where?"

"At Shillito's or one of the other department stores. They'd
give us both places in one of the men's departments. They like
pretty girls for those places--if they're not giddy and don't
waste time flirting but use flirtation to sell goods. But what's
the sense in talking about it? You haven't got the clothes. A
saleslady's got to be counter-dressed. She can look as bad as
she pleases round the skirt and the feet. But from the waist up
she has to look natty, if she wants wages."

Susan had seen these girls; she understood now why they looked
as if they were the put together upper and lower halves of two
different persons. She recalled that, even though they went into
other business, they still retained the habit, wore toilets that
were counterbuilt. She revolved the problem of getting one of
these toilets and of securing a store job. But she soon saw it
was hopeless, for the time. Every cent the three had was needed
to keep from starving and freezing. Also--though she did not
realize it--her young enthusiasm was steadily being sapped by
the life she was leading. It may have been this rather than
natural gentleness--or perhaps it was as much the one as the
other--that kept Susan from taking Matson's advice and hardening
herself into a forelady. The ruddy glow under her skin had given
place to, the roundness of her form had gone, and its pallor;
beauty remained only because she had a figure which not even
emaciation could have deprived of lines of alluring grace. But
she was no longer quite so straight, and her hair, which it was
a sheer impossibility to care for, was losing its soft vitality.
She was still pretty, but not the beauty she had been when she
was ejected from the class in which she was bred. However, she
gave the change in herself little thought; it was the rapid
decline of Etta's prettiness and freshness that worried her most.

Not many weeks after the fire and the deeper plunge, she began
to be annoyed by Ashbel. In his clumsy, clownish way he was
making advances to her. Several times he tried to kiss her.
Once, when Etta was out, he opened the door of the room where
she was taking a bath in a washtub she had borrowed of the
janitress, leered in at her and very reluctantly obeyed her
sharp order to close the door. She had long known that he was in
reality very different from the silent restrained person fear
of his father made him seem to be. But she thought even the
reality was far above the rest of the young men growing up among
those degrading influences.

The intrusion into her room was on a Sunday; on the following
Sunday he came back as soon as Etta went out. "Look here,
Lorny," said he, with blustering tone and gesture, "I want to
have a plain talk with you. I'm sick and tired of this. There's
got to be a change."

"Sick of what?" asked Susan.

"Of the way you stand me off." He plumped himself sullenly down
on the edge of hers and Etta's bed. "I can't afford to get
married. I've got to stick by you two."

"It strikes me, Ashbel, we all need each other. Who'd marry you
on seven a week?" She laughed good-humoredly. "Anyhow, _you_
wouldn't support a wife. It takes the hardest kind of work to
get your share of the expenses out of you. You always try to
beat us down to letting you off with two fifty a week."

"That's about all Etta pays."

"It's about all she gets. And __I__ pay three fifty--and she and I
do all the work--and give you two meals and a lunch to take with
you--and you've got a room alone--and your mending done. I guess
you know when you're well off."

"But I ain't well off," he cried. "I'm a grown-up man--and I've
got to have a woman."

Susan had become used to tenement conditions. She said,
practically, "Well--there's your left over four dollars a week."

"Huh!" retorted he. "Think I'm goin' to run any risks? I'm no
fool. I take care of my health."

"Well--don't bother me with your troubles--at least, troubles of
that sort."

"Yes, but I will!" shouted he, in one of those sudden furies
that seize upon the stupid ignorant. "You needn't act so nifty
with me. I'm as good as you are. I'm willing to marry you."

"No, thanks," said Susan. "I'm not free to marry--even if I would."

"Oh--you ain't?" For an instant his curiosity, as she thus laid
a hand upon the curtain over her past, distracted his uncertain
attention. But her expression, reserved, cold, maddeningly
reminding him of a class distinction of which he was as
sensitively conscious as she was unconscious--her expression
brought him back with a jerk. "Then you'll have to live with me,
anyhow. I can't stand it, and I'm not goin' to.

If you want me to stay on here, and help out, you've got to
treat me right. Other fellows that do as I'm doing get treated
right. And I've got to be, too--or I'll clear out." And he
squirmed, and waggled his head and slapped and rubbed his heavy,
powerful legs.

"Why, Ashbel," said Susan, patting him on the shoulder. "You and
I are like brother and sister. You might as well talk this way
to Etta."

He gave her a brazen look, uttered a laugh that was like the
flinging out of a bucket of filth. "Why not? Other fellows that
have to support the family and can't afford to marry gets took
care of." Susan shrank away. But Ashbel did not notice it. "It
ain't a question of Etta," he went on. "There's you--and I don't
need to look nowhere else."

Susan had long since lost power to be shocked by any revelation
of the doings of people lashed out of all civilized feelings by
the incessant brutal whips of poverty and driven back to the
state of nature. She had never happened to hear definitely of
this habit--even custom--of incestuous relations; now that she
heard, she instantly accepted it as something of which she had
really known for some time. At any rate, she had no sense of
shock. She felt no horror, no deep disgust, simply the distaste
into which her original sense of horror had been thinned down by
constant contact with poverty's conditions--just as filth no
longer made her shudder, so long as it did not touch her own person.

"You'd better go and chase yourself round the square a few
times," said she, turning away and taking up some mending.

"You see, there ain't no way out of it," pursued he, with an
insinuating grin.

Susan gave him a steady, straight look. "Don't ever speak of it
again," said she quietly. "You ought to be ashamed--and you will
be when you think it over."

He laughed loudly. "I've thought it over. I mean what I say. If
you don't do the square thing by me, you drive me out."

He came hulking up to her, tried to catch her in his big
powerful arms. She put the table between him and her. He kicked
it aside and came on. She saw that her move had given him a
false impression--a notion that she was afraid of him, was
coquetting with him. She opened the door leading into the front
part of the flat where the Quinlan family lived. "If you don't
behave yourself, I'll call Mr. Quinlan," said she, not the least
bluster or fear or nervousness in her tone.

"What'd be the use? He'd only laugh. Why, the same thing's going
on in their family."

"Still, he'd lynch you if I told him what _you_ were trying to do."

Even Ashbel saw this familiar truth of human nature. The fact
that Quinlan was guilty himself, far from staying him from
meting out savage justice to another, would make him the more
relentless and eager. "All right," said he. "Then you want me to
git out?"

"I want you to behave yourself and stay on. Go take a walk, Ashbel."

And Ashbel went. But his expression was not reassuring; Susan
feared he had no intention of accepting his defeat. However, she
reasoned that numbskull though he was, he yet had wit enough to
realize how greatly to his disadvantage any change he could make
would be. She did not speak of the matter to Etta, who was
therefore taken completely by surprise when Ashbel, after a
silent supper that evening, burst out with his grievance:

"I'm going to pack up," said he. "I've found a place where I'll
be treated right." He looked haughtily at Susan. "And the
daughter's a good looker, too. She's got some weight on her. She
ain't like a washed out string."

Etta understood at once. "What a low-down thing you are!" she
cried. "Just like the rest of these filthy tenement house
animals. I thought _you_ had some pride."

"Oh, shut up!" bawled Ashbel. "You're not such a much. What're
we, anyhow, to put on airs? We're as common as dirt--yes, and
that sniffy lady friend of yours, too. Where'd she come from,
anyhow? Some dung pile, I'll bet."

He went into his room, reappeared with his few belongings done
into a bundle. "So long," said he, stalking toward the hall door.

Etta burst into tears, caught him by the arm. "You ain't goin',
are you, Ashy?" cried she.

"Bet your life. Let me loose." And he shook her off. "I'm not
goin' to be saddled with two women that ain't got no gratitude."

"My God, Lorna!" wailed Etta. "Talk to him. Make him stay."

Susan shook her head, went to the window and gazed into the
snowy dreary prospect of tenement house yards. Ashbel, who had
been hesitating through hope, vented a jeering laugh. "Ain't she
the insultin'est, airiest lady!" sneered he. "Well, so long."

"But, Ashy, you haven't paid for last week yet," pleaded Etta,
clinging to his arm.

"You kin have my share of the furniture for that."

"The furniture! Oh, my God!" shrieked Etta, releasing him to
throw out her arms in despair. "How'll we pay for the furniture
if you go?"

"Ask your high and mighty lady friend," said her brother. And he
opened the door, passed into the hall, slammed it behind him.
Susan waited a moment for Etta to speak, then turned to see what
she was doing. She had dropped into one of the flimsy chairs,
was staring into vacancy.

"We'll have to give up these rooms right away," said Susan.

Etta roused herself, looked at her friend. And Susan saw what
Etta had not the courage to express--that she blamed her for not
having "made the best of it" and kept Ashbel. And Susan was by
no means sure that the reproach in Etta's eyes and heart were
not justified. "I couldn't do it, Etta," she said with a faint
suggestion of apology.

"Men are that way," said Etta sullenly.

"Oh, I don't blame him," protested Susan. "I understand. But--I
can't do it, Etta--I simply can't!"

"No," said Etta. "You couldn't. I could, but you couldn't. I'm
not as far down as Ashbel. I'm betwixt and between; so I can
understand you both."

"You go and make up with him and let me look after myself. I'll
get along."

Etta shook her head. "No," said she without any show of
sentiment, but like one stating an unalterable fact. "I've got
to stay on with you. I can't live without you. I don't want to
go down. I want to go up."

"Up!" Susan smiled bitterly.

Silence fell between them, and Susan planned for the new
conditions. She did not speak until Etta said, "What ever
will we do?"

"We've got to give up the furniture. Thank goodness, we've paid
only two-fifty on it."

"Yes, _it's_ got to go," said Etta.

"And we've got to pay Mrs. Quinlan the six we owe her and get
out tonight. We'll go up to the top floor--up to Mrs. Cassatt.
She takes sleepers. Then--we'll see."

An hour later they had moved; for Mrs. Quinlan was able to find
two lodgers to take the rooms at once. They were established
with Mrs. Cassatt, had a foul and foul-smelling bed and one-half
of her back room; the other half barely contained two even
dirtier and more malodorous cots, in one of which slept Mrs.
Cassatt's sixteen-year-old daughter Kate, in the other her
fourteen-year-old son Dan. For these new quarters and the right
to cook their food on the Cassatt stove the girls agreed to pay
three dollars and a half a week--which left them three dollars
and a half a week for food and clothing--and for recreation and
for the exercise of the virtue of thrift which the comfortable
so assiduously urge upon the poor.

                          CHAPTER XXI

EACH girl now had with her at all times everything she possessed
in the world--a toothbrush, a cake of castile soap, the little
money left out of the week's wages, these three items in the
pocket of her one skirt, a cheap dark blue cloth much wrinkled
and patched; a twenty-five cent felt hat, Susan's adorned with
a blue ribbon, Etta's with a bunch of faded roses; a blue cotton
blouse patched under the arms with stuff of a different shade;
an old misshapen corset that cost forty-nine cents in a bargain
sale; a suit of gray shoddy-and-wool underwear; a pair of
fifteen-cent stockings, Susan's brown, Etta's black; a pair of
worn and torn ties, scuffed and down at the heel, bought for a
dollar and nine cents; a dirt-stained dark blue jacket, Susan's
lacking one button, Etta's lacking three and having a patch
under the right arm.

Yet they often laughed and joked with each other, with their
fellow-workers. You might have said their hearts were light; for
so eager are we to believe our fellow-beings comfortable, a
smile of poverty's face convinces us straightway that it is as
happy as we, if not happier. There would have been to their
mirth a little more than mere surface and youthful ability to
find some jest in the most crushing tragedy if only they could
have kept themselves clean. The lack of sufficient food was a
severe trial, for both had voracious appetites; Etta was
tormented by visions of quantity, Susan by visions of quality as
well as of quantity. But only at meal times, or when they had to
omit a meal entirely, were they keenly distressed by the food
question. The cold was a still severer trial; but it was warm in
the factory and it was warm in Mrs. Cassatt's flat, whose
windows were never opened from closing in of winter until spring
came round. The inability to keep clean was the trial of trials.

From her beginning at the box factory the physical uncleanness
of the other girls had made Susan suffer keenly. And her
suffering can be understood only by a clean person who has been
through the same ordeal. She knew that her fellow-workers were
not to blame. She even envied them the ignorance and the
insensibility that enabled them to bear what, she was convinced,
could never be changed. She wondered sometimes at the strength
and grip of the religious belief among the girls--even, or,
rather, especially, among those who had strayed from virtue into
the path their priests and preachers and rabbis told them was
the most sinful of all strayings. But she also saw many signs
that religion was fast losing its hold. One day a Lutheran girl,
Emma Schmeltz, said during a Monday morning lunch talk:

"Well, anyhow, I believe it's all a probation, and everything'll
be made right hereafter. __I__ believe my religion, I do. Yes,
we'll be rewarded in the hereafter."

Becky--Rebecca Lichtenspiel--laughed, as did most of the girls.
Said Becky:

"And there ain't no hereafter. Did you ever see a corpse? Ain't
they the dead ones! Don't talk to me about no hereafter."

Everybody laughed. But this was a Monday morning conversation,
high above the average of the girls' talk in intelligence and
liveliness. Their minds had been stimulated by the Sunday rest
from the dreary and degenerating drudgery of "honest toil."

It was the physical contacts that most preyed upon Susan. She
was too gentle, too considerate to show her feelings; in her
determined and successful effort to conceal them she at times
went to the opposite extreme and not only endured but even
courted contacts that were little short of loathsome. Tongue
could not tell what she suffered through the persistent
affectionateness of Letty Southard, a sweet and pretty young
girl of wretchedly poor family who developed an enormous liking
for her. Letty, dirty and clad in noisome undergarments beneath
soiled rags and patches, was always hugging and kissing her--and
not to have submitted would have been to stab poor Letty to the
heart and humiliate all the other girls. So no one, not even
Etta, suspected what she was going through.

From her coming to the factory in the morning, to hang her hat
and jacket in the only possible place, along with the soiled and
smelling and often vermin-infected wraps of the others--from
early morning until she left at night she was forced into
contacts to which custom never in the least blunted her.
However, so long as she had a home with the Brashears there was
the nightly respite. But now--

There was little water, and only a cracked and filthy basin to
wash in. There was no chance to do laundry work; for their
underclothes must be used as night clothes also. To wash their
hair was impossible.

"Does my hair smell as bad as yours?" said Etta. "You needn't
think yours is clean because it doesn't show the dirt like mine."

"Does my hair smell as bad as the rest of the girls'?" said Susan.

"Not quite," was Etta's consoling reply.

By making desperate efforts they contrived partially to wash
their bodies once a week, not without interruptions of
privacy--to which, however, they soon grew accustomed. In spite
of efforts which were literally heroic, they could not always
keep free from parasites; for the whole tenement and all persons
and things in it were infected--and how could it be otherwise
where no one had time or money or any effective means whatsoever
to combat nature's inflexible determination to breed wherever
there is a breeding spot? The last traces of civilization were
slipping from the two girls; they were sinking to a state of nature.

Even personal pride, powerful in Susan and strong in Etta
through Susan's example, was deserting them. They no longer
minded Dan's sleeping in their room. They saw him, his father,
the other members of the family in all stages of nudity and at
the most private acts; and they were seen by the Cassatts in the
same way. To avoid this was impossible, as impossible as to
avoid the parasites swarming in the bed, in the woodwork, in
cracks of ceiling, walls, floor.

The Cassatts were an example of how much the people who live in
the sheltered and more or less sunny nooks owe to their shelter
and how little to their own boasted superiority of mind and
soul. They had been a high class artisan family until a few
months before. The hard times struck them a series of quick,
savage blows, such as are commonplace enough under our social
system, intricate because a crude jumble of makeshifts, and
easily disordered because intricate. They were swept without a
breathing pause down to the bottom. Those who have always been
accustomed to prosperity have no reserve of experience or
courage to enable them to recuperate from sudden and extreme
adversity. In an amazingly short time the Cassatts had become
demoralized--a familiar illustration of how civilization is
merely a wafer-thin veneer over most human beings as yet. Over
how many is it more? They fought after a fashion; they fought
valiantly. But how would it have been possible not steadily to
yield ground against such a pitiless, powerful foe as poverty?
The man had taken to drink, to blunt outraged self-respect and
to numb his despair before the spectacle of his family's
downfall. Mrs. Cassatt was as poor a manager as the average
woman in whatever walk of life, thanks to the habit of educating
woman in the most slipshod fashion, if at all, in any other part
of the business but sex-trickery. Thus she was helpless before
the tenement conditions. She gave up, went soddenly about in
rags with an incredibly greasy and usually dangling tail of hair.

"Why don't you tie up that tail, ma?" said the son Dan, who had
ideas about neatness.

"What's the use?" said Mrs. Cassatt. "What's the use of _anything_?"

"Ma don't want to look stylish and stuck up," said the daughter.

Mrs. Cassatt's haunting terror was lest someone who had known
them in the days of their prosperity with a decently furnished
little house of their own should run into one of the family now.

Kate, the sixteen-year-old had a place as saleslady in a big shop
in Fifth, Street; her six dollars a week was the family's
entire steady income. She had formerly possessed a good
deal of finery for a girl in her position, though really not
much more than the daughter of the average prosperous artisan or
small shopkeeper expects, and is expected, to have. Being at the
shop where finery was all the talk and sight and thought from
opening until closing had developed in her a greedy taste for
luxury. She pilfered from the stocks of goods within her reach
and exchanged her stealings for the stealings of girls who
happened to be able to get things more to her liking or need.
But now that the family savings--bank account was exhausted, all
these pilferings had to go at once to the pawnshop. Kate grew
more and more ill-tempered as the family sank. Formerly she had
been noted for her amiability, for her vanity easily pleased
with a careless compliment from no matter whom--a jocose,
half-drunken ash man, half-jeering, half-admiring from his cart
seat quite as satisfactory as anybody. But poverty was bringing
out in her all those meanest and most selfish and most brutish
instincts--those primal instincts of human nature that
civilization has slowly been subjecting to the process of
atrophy which has lost us such other primal attributes as, for
example, prehensile toes and a covering of hair.

"Well, I for one don't have to stay in this slop barrel," Kate
was always saying. "Some fine morning I'll turn up missing--and
you'll see me in my own turnout."

She was torturing her mother and father with the dread that she
would leave the family in the lurch and enter a house of
prostitution. She recounted with the utmost detail how the madam
of a house in Longworth Street came from time to time to her
counter in the perfumery and soap department--and urged her to
"stop making a fool of yourself and come get good money for your
looks before you lose 'em drudging behind a counter." The idea
grew less abhorrent, took on allurement as the degradation of
tenement life ate out respect for conventional restraints--for
modesty, for virtue, for cleanness of speech, and the rest. More
and more boldly Kate was announcing that she wasn't going to be
a fool much longer.

Dan, the fourteen-year-old boy, had attracted the attention of
what Cassatt called "a fancy lady" who lived two floors below
them. She made sometimes as much as nine or ten dollars a week
and slept all day or lounged comfortably about in showy, tawdry
stuff that in those surroundings seemed elegant luxury. She was
caught by the boy's young beauty and strength, and was rapidly
training him in every vice and was fitting him to become a
professional seducer and "lover."

Said Mrs. Cassatt in one of her noisy wailing appeals to Dan:

"You better keep away from that there soiled dove. They tell me
she's a thief--has done time--has robbed drunken men in dark
hallways."

Dan laughed impudently. "She's a cute one. What diff does it
make how she gets the goods as long as she gets it?"

Mrs. Cassatt confided to everybody that she was afraid the woman
would make a thief of her boy--and there was no disputing the
justice of her forebodings.

Foul smells and sights everywhere, and foul language; no
privacy, no possibility of modesty where all must do all in the
same room: vermin, parasites, bad food vilely cooked--in the
midst of these and a multitude of similar ills how was it
possible to maintain a human standard, even if one had by chance
acquired a knowledge of what constituted a human standard? The
Cassatts were sinking into the slime in which their neighbors
were already wallowing. But there was this difference. For the
Cassatts it was a descent; for many of their neighbors it was an
ascent--for the immigrants notably, who had been worse off in
their European homes; in this land not yet completely in the
grip of the capitalist or wage system they were now getting the
first notions of decency and development, the first views and
hope of rising in the world. The Cassatts, though they had
always lived too near the slime to be nauseated by it, still
found it disagreeable and in spots disgusting. Their neighbors--

One of the chief reasons why these people were rising so slowly
where they were rising at all was that the slime seemed to them
natural, and to try to get clean of it seemed rather a foolish,
finicky waste of time and effort. People who have come up--by
accident, or by their own force, or by the force of some at once
shrewd and brutal member of the family--have to be far and long
from the slums before they lose the sense that in conforming to
the decencies of life they are making absurd effeminate concessions.
When they go to buy a toothbrush they blush and stammer.

"Look at Lorna and Etta," Mrs. Cassatt was always saying to Kate.

"Well, I see 'em," Kate would reply. "And I don't see much."

"Ain't you ashamed of yourself!" cried the mother. "Them two
lives straight and decent. And you're better off than they are."

"Don't preach to me, ma," sneered Kate. "When I get ready
I'll--stop making a damn fool of myself."

But the example of the two girls was not without its effect.
They, struggling on in chastity against appalling odds, became
the models, not only to Mrs. Cassatt, but all the mothers of
that row held up to their daughters. The mothers--all of them by
observation, not a few by experience--knew what the "fancy
lady's" life really meant. And they strove mightily to keep
their daughters from it. Not through religion or moral feeling,
though many pretended--perhaps fancied--that this was their
reason; but through the plainest kind of practical sense--the
kind that in the broad determines the actions of human beings of
whatever class, however lofty the idealistic pretenses may be.
These mothers knew that the profession of the pariah meant a
short life and a wretched one, meant disease, lower and ever
lower wages, the scale swiftly descending, meant all the
miseries of respectability plus a heavy burden of miseries of
its own. There were many other girls besides Susan and Etta
holding up their heads--girls with prospects of matrimony, girls
with fairly good wages, girls with fathers and brothers at work
and able to provide a home. But Susan and Etta were peculiarly
valuable as examples because they were making the fight alone
and unaided.

Thus, they were watched closely. In those neighborhoods everyone
knows everyone's else business down to how the last cent is got
and spent. If either girl had appeared in a new pair of shoes,
a new hat, a new garment of any kind, at once the report would
have sped that the wearer had taken a turn in the streets. And
the scandal would have been justified; for where could either
have respectably got the money for the smallest and cheapest
addition to her toilet? Matson, too, proudly pointed them out as
giving the lie to the talk about working girls not getting
living wages, to the muttering against him and his fellow
employers as practically procurers for the pavement and the
dive, for the charity hospital's most dreadful wards, for the
Morgue's most piteous boxes and slabs.

As their strength declined, as their miseries ate in and in, the
two girls ceased talking together; they used to chatter much of
the time like two birds on a leafy, sunny bough. Now they
walked, ate their scanty, repulsive meals, dressed, worked, all
in silence. When their eyes met both glanced guiltily away, each
fearing the other would discover the thought she was
revolving--the thought of the streets. They slept badly--Etta
sometimes, Susan every night. For a long time after she came to
the tenements she had not slept well, despite her youth and the
dull toil that wore her out each day. But after many months she
had grown somewhat used to the noisiness--to fretting babies, to
wailing children, the mixed ale parties, the quarrelings of the
ill and the drunk, the incessant restlessness wherever people
are huddled so close together that repose is impossible. And she
had gradually acquired the habit of sleeping well--that is, well
for the tenement region where no one ever gets the rest without
which health is impossible. Now sleeplessness came again--hours
on hours of listening to the hateful and maddening discords of
densely crowded humanity, hours on hours of
thinking--thinking--in the hopeless circles like those of a
caged animal, treading with soft swift step round and round,
nose to the iron wall, eyes gleaming with despairing pain.
One Saturday evening after a supper of scorched cornmeal which
had been none too fresh when they got it at the swindling
grocer's on the street floor, Etta put on the tattered, patched
old skirt at which she had been toiling. "I can't make it fit to
wear," said she. "It's too far gone; I think"--her eyelids
fluttered--"I'll go see some of the girls."

Susan, who was darning--seated on the one chair--yes, it had once
been a chair--did not look up or speak. Etta put on her
hat--slowly. Then, with a stealthy glance at Susan, she moved
slidingly toward the door. As she reached it Susan's hands
dropped to her lap; so tense were Etta's nerves that the gesture
made her startle. "Etta!" said Susan in an appealing voice.

Etta's hand dropped from the knob. "Well--what is it, Lorna?"
she asked in a low, nervous tone.

"Look at me, dear."

Etta tried to obey, could not.

"Don't do it--yet," said Susan. "Wait--a few more days."

"Wait for what?"

"I don't know. But--wait."

"You get four, I get only three--and there's no chance of a
raise. I work slower instead of faster. I'm going to be
discharged soon. I'm in rags underneath. . . . I've got to go
before I get sick--and won't have anything to--to sell."

Susan did not reply. She stared at the remains of a cheap
stocking in her lap. Yes, there was no doubt about it, Etta's
health was going. Etta was strong, but she had no such store of
strength to draw upon as had accumulated for Susan during the
seventeen years of simple, regular life in healthful
surroundings. A little while and Etta would be ill--would,
perhaps--probably--almost certainly--die--

Dan Cassatt came in at the other door, sat on the edge of his
bed and changed his trousers for what he was pleased to imagine
a less disreputable pair. Midway the boy stopped and eyed
Susan's bare leg and foot, a grin of pleasure and amusement on
his precociously and viciously mature face.

"My, but you keep clean," he cried. "And you've got a mighty
pretty foot. Minnie's is ugly as hell."

Minnie was the "fancy lady" on the floor below--"my skirt," he
called her. Susan evidently did not hear his compliment. Dan
completed his "sporting toilet" with a sleeking down of his long
greasy hair, took himself away to his girl. Susan was watching
a bug crawl down the wall toward their bed with its stained and
malodorous covers of rag. Etta was still standing by the door
motionless. She sighed, once more put her hand on the knob.

Susan's voice came again. "You've never been out, have you?"
"No," replied Etta.

Susan began to put on her stocking. "I'll go," said she. "I'll
go--instead."

"No!" cried Etta, sobbing. "It don't matter about me. I'm bound
to be sucked under. You've got a chance to pull through."

"Not a ghost of a chance," answered Susan. "I'll go. You've
never been."

"I know, but----"

"You've never been," continued Susan, fastening her shoe with
its ragged string. "You've never been. Well--I have."

"You!" exclaimed Etta, horrified though unbelieving. "Oh, no,
you haven't."

"Yes," said Susan. "And worse."

"And worse?" repeated Etta. "Is that what the look I sometimes
see in your eyes--when you don't know anyone's seeing--is that
what it means?"

"I suppose so. I'll go. You stay here."

"And you--out there!"

"It doesn't mean much to me."

Etta looked at her with eyes as devoted as a dog's. "Then we'll
go together," she said.

Susan, pinning on her weather-stained hat, reflected. "Very
well," she said finally. "There's nothing lower than this."

They said no more; they went out into the clear, cold winter
night, out under the brilliant stars. Several handsome theater
buses were passing on their way from the fashionable suburb to
the theater. Etta looked at them, at the splendid horses, at the
men in top hats and fur coats--clean looking, fine looking,
amiable looking men--at the beautiful fur wraps of the delicate
women--what complexions!--what lovely hair!--what jewels! Etta,
her heart bursting, her throat choking, glanced at Susan to see
whether she too was observing. But Susan's eyes were on the
tenement they had just left.

"What are you looking at--so queer?" asked Etta.

"I was thinking that we'll not come back here."

Etta started. "Not come back _home!_"

Susan gave a strange short laugh. "Home!. . . No, we'll not
come back home. There's no use doing things halfway. We've made
the plunge. We'll go--the limit."

Etta shivered. She admired the courage, but it terrified her.
"There's something--something--awful about you, Lorna," she
said. "You've changed till you're like a different person from
what you were when you came to the restaurant. Sometimes--that
look in your eyes--well, it takes my breath away."

"It takes _my_ breath away, too. Come on."

At the foot of the hill they took the shortest route for Vine
Street, the highway of the city's night life.

Though they were so young and walked briskly, their impoverished
blood was not vigorous enough to produce a reaction against the
sharp wind of the zero night which nosed through their few thin
garments and bit into their bodies as if they were naked. They
came to a vast department store. Each of its great show-windows,
flooded with light, was a fascinating display of clothing for
women upon wax models--costly jackets and cloaks of wonderful
furs, white, brown, gray, rich and glossy black; underclothes
fine and soft, with ribbons and flounces and laces; silk
stockings and graceful shoes and slippers; dresses for street,
for ball, for afternoon, dresses with form, with lines, dresses
elegantly plain, dresses richly embroidered. Despite the cold
the two girls lingered, going from window to window, their
freezing faces pinched and purple, their eyes gazing hungrily.

"Now that we've tried 'em all on," said Susan with a short and
bitter laugh, "let's dress in our dirty rags again and go."

"Oh, I couldn't imagine myself in any of those things--could
you?" cried Etta.

"Yes," answered Susan. "And better."

"You were brought up to have those things, I know."

Susan shook her head. "But I'm going to have them."

"When?" said Etta, scenting romance. "Soon?"

"As soon as I learn," was Susan's absent, unsatisfactory reply.

Etta had gone back to her own misery and the contrasts to it. "I
get mad through and through," she cried, "when I think how all
those things go to some women--women that never did work and
never could. And they get them because they happen to belong to
rich fathers and husbands or whoever protects them. It isn't
fair! It makes me crazy!"

Susan gave a disdainful shrug. "What's the use of that kind of
talk!" said she. "No use at all. The thing is, _we_ haven't got
what we want, and we've got to _get_ it--and so we've got to
_learn_ how."

"I can't think of anything but the cold," said Etta. "My God,
how cold I am! There isn't anything I wouldn't do to get warm.
There isn't anything anybody wouldn't do to get warm, if they
were as cold as this. It's all very well for warm people to
talk----"

"Oh, I'm sick of all the lying and faking, anyhow. Do you
believe in hell, Lorna?"

"Not in a hot one," said Susan.

Soon they struck into Vine Street, bright as day almost, and
lined with beer halls, concert gardens, restaurants. Through the
glass fronts crowds of men and women were visible--contented
faces, well-fed bodies, food on the tables or inviting-looking
drink. Along the sidewalk poured an eager throng, all the
conspicuous faces in it notable for the expectancy of pleasure
in the eyes.

"Isn't this different!" exclaimed Etta. "My God, how cold I
am--and how warm everybody else is but us!"

The sights, the sounds of laughter, of gay music, acted upon her
like an intoxicant. She tossed her head in a reckless gesture.
"I don't care what becomes of me," said she. "I'm ready for
anything except dirt and starvation."

Nevertheless, they hurried down Vine Street, avoiding the
glances of the men and behaving as if they were two working
girls in a rush to get home. As they walked, Susan, to delude
herself into believing that she was not hesitating, with
fainting courage talked incessantly to Etta--told her the things
Mabel Connemora had explained to her--about how a woman could,
and must, take care of her health, if she were not to be swept
under like the great mass of the ignorant, careless women of the
pariah class. Susan was astonished that she remembered all the
actress had told her--remembered it easily, as if she had often
thought of it, had used the knowledge habitually.

They arrived at Fountain Square, tired from the long walk. They
were both relieved and depressed that nothing had happened. "We
might go round the fountain and then back," suggested Susan.

They made the tour less rapidly but still keeping their heads
and their glances timidly down. They were numb with the cold
now. To the sharp agony had succeeded an ache like the steady
grinding pain of rheumatism. Etta broke the silence with, "Maybe
we ought to go into a house."

"A house! Oh--you mean a--a sporting house." At that time
professional prostitution had not become widespread among the
working class; stationary or falling wages, advancing cost of
food and developing demand for comfort and luxury had as yet
only begun to produce their inevitable results. Thus,
prostitution as an industry was in the main segregated in
certain streets and certain houses and the prostitutes were a
distinct class.

"You haven't been?" inquired Etta.

"No," said Susan.

"Dan Cassatt and Kate told me about those places," Etta went on.
"Kate says they're fine and the girls make fifty and sometimes
a hundred dollars a week, and have everything--servants to wait
on them, good food, bathrooms, lovely clothes, and can drive
out. But I--I think I'd stay in the house."

"I want to be my own boss," said Susan.

"There's another side than what Kate says," continued Etta as
consecutively as her chattering teeth would permit. "She heard
from a madam that wants her to come. But Dan heard from
Minnie--she used to be in one--and she says the girls are
slaves, that they're treated like dogs and have to take
anything. She says it's something dreadful the way men act--even
the gentlemen. She says the madam fixes things so that every
girl always owes her money and don't own a stitch to her back,
and so couldn't leave if she wanted to."

"That sounds more like the truth," said Susan.

"But we may _have_ to go," pleaded Etta. "It's awful cold--and if
we went, at least we'd have a warm place. If we wanted to leave,
why, we couldn't be any worse off for clothes than we are."

Susan had no answer for this argument. They went several squares
up Vine Street in silence. Then Etta burst out again:

"I'm frozen through and through, Lorna, and I'm dead tired--and
hungry. The wind's cutting the flesh off my bones. What in the
hell does it matter what becomes of us? Let's get warm, for
God's sake. Let's go to a house. They're in Longworth
Street--the best ones."

And she came to a halt, forcing Susan to halt also. It happened
to be the corner of Eighth Street. Susan saw the iron fence, the
leafless trees of Garfield Place. "Let's go down this way," said
she. "I had luck here once."

"Luck!" said Etta, her curiosity triumphant over all.

Susan's answer was a strange laugh. Ahead of them, a woman
warmly and showily dressed was sauntering along. "That's one of
them," said Etta. "Let's see how _she_ does it. We've got to
learn quick. I can't stand this cold much longer."

The two girls, their rags fluttering about their miserable
bodies, kept a few feet behind the woman, watched her with
hollow eyes of envy and fear. Tears of anguish from the cold
were streaming down their cheeks. Soon a man alone--a youngish
man with a lurching step--came along. They heard the woman say,
"Hello, dear. Don't be in a hurry."

He tried to lurch past her, but she seized him by the lapel of
his overcoat. "Lemme go," said he. "You're old enough to be a
grandmother, you old hag."

Susan and Etta halted and, watching so interestedly that they
forgot themselves, heard her laugh at his insult, heard her say
wheedlingly, "Come along, dearie, I'll treat you right. You're
the kind of a lively, joky fellow I like."

"Go to hell, gran'ma," said the man, roughly shaking her off and
lurching on toward the two girls. He stopped before them, eyed
them by the light of the big electric lamp, grinned
good-naturedly. "What've we got here?" said he. "This looks better."

The woman rushed toward the girls, pouring out a stream of
vileness. "You git out of here!" she shrilled. "You chippies git
off my beat. I'll have you pinched--I will!"

"Shut up!" cried the drunken man, lifting his fist. "I'll have
_you_ pinched. Let these ladies alone, they're friends of mine.
Do you want me to call the cop?"

The woman glanced toward the corner where a policeman was
standing, twirling his club. She turned away, cursing horribly.
The man laughed. "Dirty old hag--isn't she?" said he. "Don't
look so scared, birdies." He caught them each by an arm, stared
woozily at Etta. "You're a good little looker, you are. Come
along with me. There's three in it."

"I--I can't leave my lady friend," Etta succeeded in chattering.
"Please really I can't."

"Your lady friend?" He turned his drunken head in Susan's
direction, squinted at her. He was rather good-looking. "Oh--she
means _you_. Fact is, I'm so soused I thought I was seein'
double. Why, _you're_ a peach. I'll take you." And he released his
hold on Etta to seize her. "Come right along, my lovey-dovey dear."

Susan drew away; she was looking at him with terror and
repulsion. The icy blast swept down the street, sawed into her
flesh savagely.

"I'll give _you_ five," said the drunken man. "Come along." He
grabbed her arm, waved his other hand at Etta. "So long,
blondie. 'Nother time. Good luck."

Susan heard Etta's gasp of horror. She wrenched herself free
again. "I guess I'd better go with him," said she to Etta.

Etta began to sob. "Oh, Lorna!" she moaned. "It's awful."

"You go into the restaurant on the corner and get something to
eat, and wait for me. We can afford to spend the money. And
you'll be warm there."

"Here! Here!" cried the tipsy man. "What're you two whispering
about? Come along, skinny. No offense. I like 'em slim." And he
made coarse and pointed remarks about the sluggishness of fat
women, laughing loudly at his own wit.

The two girls did not hear. The wind straight from the Arctic
was plying its hideous lash upon their defenseless bodies.

"Come on, lovey!" cried the man. "Let's go in out of the cold."

"Oh, Lorna! You can't go with a drunken man! I'll--I'll take
him. I can stand it better'n you. You can go when there's a
gentleman "

"You don't know," said Susan. "Didn't I tell you I'd been
through the worst?"

"Are you coming?" broke in the man, shaking his head to scatter
the clouds over his sight.

The cold was lashing Susan's body; and she was seeing the
tenement she had left--the vermin crawling, the filth
everywhere, the meal bugs in the rotting corn meal--and Jeb
Ferguson. "Wait in the restaurant," said she to Etta. "Didn't I
tell you I'm a nobody. This is what's expected of me." The wind
clawed and tore at her quivering flesh. "It's cold, Etta. Go get
warm. Good-by."

She yielded to the tipsy man's tugging at her arm. Etta stood as
if paralyzed, watching the two move slowly westward. But cold
soon triumphed over horror. She retraced her steps toward Vine
Street. At the corner stood an elderly man with an iron-gray
beard. She merely glanced at him in passing, and so was startled
when he said in a low voice:

"Go back the way you came. I'll join you." She glanced at him
again, saw a gleam in his eyes that assured her she had not
imagined the request. Trembling and all at once hot, she kept on
across the street. But instead of going into the restaurant she
walked past it and east through dark Eighth Street. A few yards,
and she heard a quiet step behind her. A few yards more, and the
lights of Vine Street threw a man's shadow upon the sidewalk
beside her. From sheer fright she halted. The man faced her--a
man old enough to be her father, a most respectable, clean
looking man with a certain churchly though hardly clerical air
about him. "Good evening, miss," said he.

"Good evening," she faltered.

"I'm a stranger--in town to buy goods and have a little fun,"
stammered he with a grotesque attempt to be easy and familiar.
"I thought maybe you could help me."

A little fun! Etta's lips opened, but no words came. The cold
was digging its needle-knives into flesh, into bone, into nerve.
Through the man's thick beard and mustache came the gleam of
large teeth, the twisting of thick raw lips. A little fun!

"Would it," continued the man, nervously, "would it be very dear?"

"I--I don't know," faltered Etta.

"I could afford--say--" he looked at her dress--"say--two dollars."

"I--I" And again Etta could get no further.

"The room'd be a dollar," pleaded the man. "That'd make it three."

"I--I--can't," burst out Etta, hysterical. "Oh, please let me
alone. I--I'm a good girl, but I do need money. But I--I can't.
Oh, for God's sake--I'm so cold--so cold!"

The man was much embarrassed. "Oh, I'm sorry," he said
feelingly. "That's right--keep your virtue. Go home to your
parents." He was at ease now; his voice was greasy and his words
sleek with the unction of an elder. "I thought you were a soiled
dove. I'm glad you spoke out--glad for my sake as well as your
own. I've got a daughter about your age. Go home, my dear, and
stay a good girl. I know it's hard sometimes; but never give up
your purity--never!" And he lifted his square-topped hard hat
and turned away.

Suddenly Etta felt again the fury of the winter night and icy
wind. As that wind flapped her thin skirt and tortured her
flesh, she cried, "Wait--please. I was just--just fooling."

The man had halted, but he was looking at her uncertainly. Etta
put her hand on his arm and smiled pertly up at him--smiled as
she had seen other street girls smile in the days when she
despised them. "I'll go--if you'll give me three."

"I--I don't think I care to go now. You sort of put me out of
the humor."

"Well--two, then." She gave a reckless laugh. "God, how cold it
is! Anybody'd go to hell to get warm a night like this."

"You are a very pretty girl," said the man. He was warmly
dressed; his was not the thin blood of poverty. He could not
have appreciated what she was feeling. "You're sure you want to
go? You're sure it's your--your business?"

"Yes. I'm strange in this part of town. Do you know a place?"

An hour later Etta went into the appointed restaurant. Her eyes
searched anxiously for Susan, but did not find her. She inquired
at the counter. No one had asked there for a young lady. This
both relieved her and increased her nervousness; Susan had not
come and gone--but would she come? Etta was so hungry that she
could hold out no longer. She sat at a table near the door and
took up the large sheet on which was printed the bill of fare.
She was almost alone in the place, as it was between dinner and
supper. She read the bill thoroughly, then ordered black bean
soup, a sirloin steak and German fried potatoes. This, she had
calculated, would cost altogether a dollar; undoubtedly an
extravagance, but everything at that restaurant seemed dear in
comparison with the prices to which she had been used, and she
felt horribly empty. She ordered the soup, to stay her while the
steak was broiling.

As soon as the waiter set down bread and butter she began upon
it greedily. As the soup came, in walked Susan--calm and
self-possessed, Etta saw at first glance. "I've been so
frightened. You'll have a plate of soup?" asked Etta, trying to
look and speak in unconcerned fashion.

"No, thank you," replied Susan, seating herself opposite.

"There's a steak coming--a good-sized one, the waiter said it'd be."

"Very well."

Susan spoke indifferently.

"Aren't you hungry?"

"I don't know. I'll see." Susan was gazing straight ahead. Her
eyes were distinctly gray--gray and as hard as Susan Lenox's
eyes could be.

"What're you thinking about?"

"I don't know," she laughed queerly.

"Was--it--dreadful?"

A pause, then: "Nothing is going to be dreadful to me any more.
It's all in the game, as Mr. Burlingham used to say."

"Burlingham--who's he?" It was Etta's first faint clew toward
that mysterious past of Susan's into which she longed to peer.

"Oh--a man I knew. He's dead."

A long pause, Etta watching Susan's unreadable face. At last she said:

"You don't seem a bit excited."

Susan came back to the present. "Don't I? Your soup's getting cold."

Etta ate several spoonfuls, then said with an embarrassed
attempt at a laugh, "I--I went, too."

Susan slowly turned upon Etta her gaze--the gaze of eyes
softening, becoming violet. Etta's eyes dropped and the color
flooded into her fair skin. "He was an old man--forty or maybe
fifty," she explained nervously. "He gave me two dollars. I
nearly didn't get him. I lost my nerve and told him I was good
and was only starting because I needed money."

"Never whine," said Susan. "It's no use. Take what comes, and
wait for a winning hand."

Etta looked at her in a puzzled way. "How queer you talk! Not a
bit like yourself. You sound so much older. . . . And your
eyes--they don't look natural at all."

Indeed they looked supernatural. The last trace of gray was
gone. They were of the purest, deepest violet, luminous,
mysterious, with that awe-inspiring expression of utter
aloneness. But as Etta spoke the expression changed. The gray
came back and with it a glance of irony. Said she:

"Oh--nonsense! I'm all right."

"I didn't mind nearly as much as I thought I would. Yes, I'll
get used to it."

"You mustn't," said Susan.

"But I've got to."

"We've got to do it, but we haven't got to get used to it,"
replied Susan.

Etta was still puzzling at this when the dinner now came--a
fine, thick broiled steak, the best steak Susan had ever seen,
and the best food Etta had ever seen.

They had happened upon one of those famous Cincinnati chop
houses where in plain surroundings the highest quality of plain
food is served. "You _are_ hungry, aren't you, Lorna?" said Etta.

"Yes--I'm hungry," declared Susan. "Cut it--quick."

"Draught beer or bottled?" asked the waiter.

"Bring us draught beer," said Etta. "I haven't tasted beer since
our restaurant burned."

"I never tasted it," said Susan. "But I'll try it tonight."

Etta cut two thick slices from the steak, put them on Susan's
plate with some of the beautifully browned fried potatoes.
"Gracious, they have good things to eat here!" she exclaimed.
Then she cut two thick slices for herself, and filled her mouth.
Her eyes glistened, the color came into her pale cheeks. "Isn't
it _grand_!" she cried, when there was room for words to pass out.

"Grand," agreed Susan, a marvelous change of expression in her
face also.

The beer came. Etta drank a quarter of the tall glass at once.
Susan tasted, rather liked the fresh bitter-sweet odor and
flavor. "Is it--very intoxicating?" she inquired.

"If you drink enough," said Etta. "But not one glass."

Susan took quite a drink. "I feel a lot less tired already,"
declared she.

"Me too," said Etta. "My, what a meal! I never had anything like
this in my life. When I think what we've been through! Lorna,
will it _last_?"

"We mustn't think about that," said Susan.

"Tell me what happened to you."

"Nothing. He gave me the money, that was all."

"Then we've got seven dollars--seven dollars and twenty cents,
with what we brought away from home with us."

"Seven dollars--and twenty cents," repeated Susan thoughtfully.
Then a queer smile played around the corners of her mouth.
"Seven dollars--that's a week's wages for both of us at Matson's."

"But I'd go back to honest work tomorrow--if I could find a good
job," Etta said eagerly--too eagerly. "Wouldn't you, Lorna?"

"I don't know," replied Susan. She had the inability to make
pretenses, either to others or to herself, which characterizes
stupid people and also the large, simple natures.

"Oh, you can't mean that!" protested Etta. Instead of replying
Susan began to talk of what to do next. "We must find a place to
sleep, and we must buy a few things to make a better appearance."

"I don't dare spend anything yet," said Etta. "I've got only my
two dollars. Not that when this meal's paid for."

"We're going to share even," said Susan. "As long as either has
anything, it belongs to both."

The tears welled from Etta's eyes. "You are too good, Lorna!
You mustn't be. It isn't the way to get on. Anyhow, I can't
accept anything from you. You wouldn't take anything from me."

"We've got to help each other up," insisted Susan. "We share
even--and let's not talk any more about it. Now, what shall we
get? How much ought we to lay out?"

The waiter here interrupted. "Beg pardon, young ladies," said
he. "Over yonder, at the table four down, there's a couple of
gents that'd like to join you. I seen one of 'em flash quite a
roll, and they acts too like easy spenders."

As Susan was facing that way, she examined them. They were young
men, rather blond, with smooth faces, good-natured eyes and
mouths; they were well dressed--one, the handsomer, notably so.
Susan merely glanced; both men at once smiled at her with an
unimpertinent audacity that probably came out of the champagne
bottle in a silver bucket of ice on their table.

"Shall I tell 'em to come over?" said the waiter.

"Yes," replied Susan.

She was calm, but Etta twitched with nervousness, saying, "I
wish I'd had your experience. I wish we didn't look so
dreadful--me especially. __I__'m not pretty enough to stand out
against these awful clothes."

The two men were pushing eagerly toward them, the taller and
less handsome slightly in advance. He said, his eyes upon Susan,
"We were lonesome, and you looked a little that way too. We're much
obliged." He glanced at the waiter. "Another bottle of the same."

"I don't want anything to drink," said Susan.

"Nor I," chimed in Etta. "No, thank you."

The young man waved the waiter away with, "Get it for my friend
and me, then." He smiled agreeably at Susan. "You won't mind my
friend and me drinking?"

"Oh, no. "

"And maybe you'll change your mind," said the shorter man to
Etta. "You see, if we all drink, we'll get acquainted faster.
Don't you like champagne?"

"I never tasted it," Etta confessed.

"Neither did I," admitted Susan.

"You're sure to like it," said the taller man to Susan--his
friend presently addressed him as John. "Noththing{sic} equal to
it for making friends. I like it for itself, and I like it for
the friends it has made me."

Champagne was not one of the commonplaces of that modest chop
house. So the waiter opened the bottle with much ceremony. Susan
and Etta startled when the cork popped ceilingward in the way
that in such places is still regarded as fashionable. They
watched with interested eyes the pouring of the beautiful pale
amber liquid, were fascinated when they saw how the bubbles
surged upward incessantly, imprisoned joys thronging to escape.
And after the first glass, the four began to have the kindliest
feelings for each other. Sorrow and shame, poverty and
foreboding, took wings unto themselves and flew away. The girls
felt deliciously warm and contented, and thought the young men
charming--a splendid change from the coarse, badly dressed
youths of the tenement, with their ignorant speech and rough,
misshapen hands. They were ashamed of their own hands, were
painfully self-conscious whenever lifting the glass to the lips
brought them into view. Etta's hands in fact were not so badly
spoiled as might have been expected, considering her long years
of rough work; the nails were in fairly good condition and the
skin was rougher to the touch than to the sight. Susan's hands
had not really been spoiled as yet. She had been proud of them
and had taken care of them; still, they were not the hands of a
lady, but of a working girl. The young men had gentlemen's
hands--strong, evidently exercised only at sports, not at
degrading and deforming toil.

The shorter and handsomer youth, who answered to the name of
Fatty, for obvious but not too obvious reasons, addressed
himself to Etta. John--who, it came out, was a Chicagoan,
visiting Fatty--fell to Susan. The champagne made him voluble;
he was soon telling all about himself--a senior at Ann Arbor, as
was Fatty also; he intended to be a lawyer; he was fond of a
good, time was fond of the girls--liked girls who were gay
rather than respectable ones--"because with the prim girls you
have to quit just as the fun ought really to begin."

After two glasses Susan, warned by a slight dizziness, stopped
drinking; Etta followed her example. But the boys kept on,
ordered a second bottle. "This is the fourth we've had tonight,"
said Fatty proudly when it came.

"Don't it make you dizzy?" asked Etta.

"Not a bit," Fatty assured her. But she noticed that his tongue
now swung trippingly loose.

"You haven't been at--at this--long, have you?" inquired John
of Susan.

"Not long," replied she.

Etta, somewhat giddied, overheard and put in, "We began tonight.
We got tired of starving and freezing."

John looked deepest sympathy into Susan's calm violet-gray eyes.
"I don't blame you," said he. "A woman does have a--a hades of
a time!"

"We were going out to buy some clothes when you came," proceeded
Etta. "We're in an awful state."

"I wondered how two girls with faces like yours," said John,
"came to be dressed so--so differently. That was what first
attracted us." Then, as Etta and Fatty were absorbed in each
other, he went on to Susan: "And your eyes--I mustn't forget
them. You certainly have got a beautiful face. And your mouth--so
sweet and sad--but, what a lovely, _lovely_ smile!"

At this Susan smiled still more broadly with pleasure. "I'm glad
you're pleased," said she.

"Why, if you were dressed up----

"You're not a working girl by birth, are you?"

"I wish I had been," said Susan.

"Oh, I think a girl's got as good a right as a man to have a
good time," lied John.

"Don't say things you don't believe," said Susan. "It isn't necessary."

"I can hand that back to you. You weren't frank, yourself, when
you said you wished you'd been born in the class of your
friend--and of my friend Fatty, too."

Susan's laugh was confession. The champagne was dancing in her
blood. She said with a reckless toss of the head:

"I was born nothing. So I'm free to become anything I please
anything except respectable."

Here Fatty broke in. "I'll tell you what let's do. Let's all go
shopping. We can help you girls select your things."

Susan laughed. "We're going to buy about three dollars' worth.
There won't be any selecting. We'll simply take the cheapest."

"Then--let's go shopping," said John, "and you two girls can
help Fatty and me select clothes for you."

"That's the talk!" cried Fatty. And he summoned the waiter. "The
bill," said he in the manner of a man who likes to enjoy the
servility of servants.

"We hadn't paid for our supper," said Susan. "How much was it, Etta?"

"A dollar twenty-five."

"We're going to pay for that," said Fatty. "What d'ye take us for?"

"Oh, no. We must pay it," said Susan.

"Don't be foolish. Of course I'll pay."

"No," said Susan quietly, ignoring Etta's wink. And from her
bosom she took a crumpled five-dollar bill.

"I should say you _were_ new," laughed John. "You don't even know
where to carry your money yet." And they all laughed, Susan and
Etta because they felt gay and assumed the joke whatever it was
must be a good one. Then John laid his hand over hers and said,
"Put your money away."

Susan looked straight at him. "I can't allow it," she said. "I'm
not that poor--yet."

John colored. "I beg your pardon," he said. And when the bill
came he compelled Fatty to let her pay a dollar and a quarter of
it out of her crumpled five. The two girls were fascinated by
the large roll of bills--fives, tens, twenties--which Fatty took
from his trousers pocket. They stared open-eyed when he laid a
twenty on the waiter's plate along with Susan's five. And it
frightened them when he, after handing Susan her change, had
left only a two-dollar bill, four silver quarters and a dime. He
gave the silver to the waiter.

"Was that for a tip?" asked Susan.

"Yes," said Fatty. "I always give about ten per cent of the bill
unless it runs over ten dollars. In that case--a quarter a
person as a rule. Of course, if the bill was very large, I'd
give more." He was showing his amusement at her inquisitiveness.

"I wanted to know," explained she. "I'm very ignorant, and I've
got to learn."

"That's right," said John, admiringly--with a touch of
condescension. "Don't be afraid to confess ignorance."

"I'm not," replied Susan. "I used to be afraid of not being
respectable and that was all. Now, I haven't any fear at all."

"You are a queer one!" exclaimed John. "You oughtn't to be in
this life."

"Where then?" asked she.

"I don't know," he confessed.

"Neither do I." Her expression suddenly was absent, with a
quaint, slight smile hovering about her lips. She looked at him
merrily. "You see, it's got to be something that isn't respectable."

"What _do_ you mean?" demanded he.

Her answer was a laugh.

Fatty declared it too cold to chase about afoot--"Anyhow, it's
late--nearly eleven, and unless we're quick all the stores'll be
closed." The waiter called them a carriage; its driver promised
to take them to a shop that didn't close till midnight on
Saturdays. Said Fatty, as they drove away:

"Well, I suppose, Etta, you'll say you've never been in a
carriage before."

"Oh, yes, I have," cried Etta. "Twice--at funerals."

This made everyone laugh--this and the champagne and the air
which no longer seemed cruel to the girls but stimulating, a
grateful change from the close warmth of the room. As the boys
were smoking cigarettes, they had the windows down. The faces of
both girls were flushed and lively, and their cheeks seemed
already to have filled out. The four made so much noise that the
crowds on the sidewalk were looking at them--looking smilingly,
delighted by the sight of such gayety. Susan was even gayer than
Etta. She sang, she took a puff at John's cigarette; then
laughed loudly when he seized and kissed her, laughed again as
she kissed him; and she and John fell into each other's arms and
laughed uproariously as they saw Fatty and Etta embracing.

The driver kept his promise; eleven o'clock found them bursting
into Sternberg's, over the Rhine--a famous department store for
Germans of all classes. They had an hour, and they made good use
of it. Etta was for yielding to Fatty's generous urgings and
buying right and left. But Susan would not have it. She told the
men what she and Etta would take--a simple complete outfit, and
no more. Etta wanted furs and finery. Susan kept her to plain,
serviceable things. Only once did she yield. When Etta and Fatty
begged to be allowed a big showy hat, Susan yielded--but gave
John leave to buy her only the simplest of simple hats. "You
needn't tell _me_ any yarns about your birth and breeding," said
he in a low tone so that Etta should not hear.

But that subject did not interest Susan. "Let's forget it,"
said she, almost curtly. "I've cut out the past--and the future.
Today's enough for me."

"And for me, too," protested he. "I hope you're having as good
fun as I am."

"This is the first time I've really laughed in nearly a year,"
said she. "You don't know what it means to be poor and hungry
and cold--worst of all, cold."

"You unhappy child," said John tenderly.

But Susan was laughing again, and making jokes about a wonderful
German party dress all covered with beads and lace and ruffles
and embroidery. When they reached the shoe department, Susan
asked John to take Fatty away. He understood that she was
ashamed of their patched and holed stockings, and hastened to
obey. They were making these their last purchases when the big
bell rang for the closing. "I'm glad these poor tired shopgirls
and clerks are set free," said John.

It was one of those well-meaning but worthless commonplaces of
word-kindness that get for their utterance perhaps exaggerated
credit for "good heart." Susan, conscience-stricken, halted.
"And I never once thought of them!" she exclaimed. "It just shows."

"Shows what?"

"Oh, nothing. Come on. I must forget that, for I can't be happy
again till I do. I understand now why the comfortable people can
be happy. They keep from knowing or they make themselves forget."

"Why not?" said John. "What's the use in being miserable about
things that can't be helped?"

"No use at all," replied the girl. She laughed. "I've forgotten."

The carriage was so filled with their bundles that they had some
difficulty in making room for themselves--finally accomplished
it by each girl sitting on her young man's lap. They drove to a
quietly placed, scrupulously clean little hotel overlooking
Lincoln Park. "We're going to take rooms here and dress,"
explained Fatty. "Then we'll wander out and have some supper."

By this time Susan and Etta had lost all sense of strangeness.
The spirit of adventure was rampant in them as in a dreaming
child. And the life they had been living--what they had seen and
heard and grown accustomed to--made it easy for them to strike
out at once and briskly in the new road, so different from the
dreary and cruel path along which they had been plodding. They
stood laughing and joking in the parlor while the boys
registered; then the four went up to two small but comfortable
and fascinatingly clean rooms with a large bathroom between.
"Fatty and I will go down to the bar while you two dress," said John.

"Not on your life!" exclaimed Fatty. "We'll have the bar brought
up to us."

But John, fortified by Susan's look of gratitude for his
tactfulness, whispered to his friend--what Susan could easily
guess. And Fatty said, "Oh, I never thought of it. Yes, we'll
give 'em a chance. Don't be long, girls."

"Thank you," said Susan to John.

"That's all right. Take your time."

Susan locked the hall door behind the two men. She rushed to the
bathroom, turned on the hot water. "Oh, Etta!" she cried, tears
in her eyes, a hysterical sob in her throat. "A bathtub again!"

Etta too was enthusiastic; but she had not that intense
hysterical joy which Susan felt--a joy that can be appreciated
only by a person who, clean by instinct and by lifelong habit,
has been shut out from thorough cleanliness for long months of
dirt and foul odors and cold. It was no easy matter to become
clean again after all those months. But there was plenty of soap
and brushes and towels, and at last the thing was accomplished.
Then they tore open the bundles and arrayed themselves in the
fresh new underclothes, in the simple attractive costumes of
jacket, blouse and skirt. Susan had returned to her class, and
had brought Etta with her.

"What shall we do with these?" asked Etta, pointing disdainfully
with the toe of her new boot to the scatter of the garments they
had cast off.

Susan looked down at it in horror. She could not believe that
_she_ had been wearing such stuff--that it was the clothing of
all her associates of the past six months--was the kind of
attire in which most of her fellow-beings went about the
beautiful earth, She shuddered. "Isn't life dreadful?" she
cried. And she kicked together the tattered, patched, stained
trash, kicked it on to a large piece of heavy wrapping paper she
had spread out upon the floor. Thus, without touching her
discarded self, she got it wrapped up and bound with a strong
string. She rang for the maid, gave her a quarter and pointed to
the bundle. "Please take that and throw it away," she said.

When the maid was gone Etta said: "I'm mighty glad to have it
out of the room."

"Out of the room?" cried Susan. "Out of my heart. Out of my life."

They put on their hats, admired themselves in the mirror, and
descended--Susan remembering halfway that they had left the
lights on and going back to turn them off. The door boy summoned
the two young men to the parlor. They entered and exclaimed in
real amazement. For they were facing two extremely pretty young
women, one dark, the other fair. The two faces were wreathed in
pleased and grateful smiles.

"Don't we look nice?" demanded Etta.

"Nice!" cried Fatty. "We sure did draw a pair of first
prizes--didn't we, Johnny?"

John did not reply. He was gazing at Susan. Etta had young
beauty but it was of the commonplace kind. In Susan's face and
carriage there was far more than beauty. "Where _did_ you come
from?" said John to her in an undertone. "And _where_ are you going?"

"Out to supper, I hope," laughed she.

"Your eyes change--don't they? I thought they were violet. Now
I see they're gray--gray as can be."

                         CHAPTER XXII

AT lunch, well toward the middle of the following afternoon,
Fatty--his proper name was August Gulick--said: "John and I
don't start for Ann Arbor until a week from today. That means
seven clear days. A lot can be done in that time, with a little
intelligent hustling. What do you say, girls? Do you stick to us?"

"As long as you'll let us," said Etta, who was delighting Gulick
with her frank and wondering and grateful appreciation of his
munificence. Never before had his own private opinion of himself
received such a flatteringly sweeping indorsement--from anyone
who happened to impress him as worth while. In the last phrase
lies the explanation of her success through a policy that is
always dangerous and usually a failure.

So it was settled that with the quiet little hotel as
headquarters the four would spend a week in exploring Cincinnati
as a pleasure ground. Gulick knew the town thoroughly. His
father was a brewer whose name was on many a huge beer wagon
drawn about those streets by showy Clydesdales. Also he had
plenty of money; and, while Redmond--for his friend was the son
of Redmond, well known as a lawyer-politician in Chicago--had
nothing like so much as Gulick, still he had enough to make a
passable pretense at keeping up his end. For Etta and Susan the
city had meant shabby to filthy tenements, toil and weariness
and sorrow. There was opened to their ravished young eyes "the
city"--what reveals itself to the pleasure-seeker with pocket
well filled--what we usually think of when we pronounce its
name, forgetting what its reality is for all but a favored few
of those within its borders. It was a week of music and of
laughter--music especially--music whenever they ate or drank,
music to dance by, music in the beer gardens where they spent
the early evenings, music at the road houses where they arrived
in sleighs after the dances to have supper--unless you choose to
call it breakfast. You would have said that Susan had slipped
out of the tenement life as she had out of its garments, that she
had retained not a trace of it even in memory. But--in those days
began her habit of never passing a beggar without giving something.

Within three or four days this life brought a truly amazing
transformation in the two girls. You would not have recognized
in them the pale and wan and ragged outcasts of only the
Saturday night before. "Aren't you happy?" said Etta to Susan,
in one of the few moments they were alone. "But I don't need to
ask. I didn't know you could be so gay."

"I had forgotten how to laugh," replied Susan.

"I suppose I ought to be ashamed," pursued Etta.

"Why?" inquired Susan.

"Oh, you know why. You know how people'd talk if they knew."

"What people?" said Susan. "Anyone who's willing to give you anything?"

"No," admitted Etta. "But----" There she halted.

Susan went on: "I don't propose to be bothered by the other
kind. They wouldn't do anything for me if they could except
sneer and condemn."

"Still, you know it isn't right, what we're doing."

"I know it isn't cold--or hunger--or rags and dirt--and bugs,"
replied Susan.

Those few words were enough to conjure even to Etta's duller
fancy the whole picture to its last detail of loathsome squalor.
Into Etta's face came a dazed expression. "Was that really _us_, Lorna?"

"No," said Susan with a certain fierceness. "It was a dream. But
we must take care not to have that dream again."

"I'd forgotten how cold I was," said Etta; "hadn't you?"

"No," said Susan, "I hadn't forgotten anything."

"Yes, I suppose it was all worse for you than for me. _You_ used
to be a lady."

"Don't talk nonsense," said Susan.

"I don't regret what I'm doing," Etta now declared. "It was Gus
that made me think about it." She looked somewhat sheepish as
she went on to explain. "I had a little too much to drink last
night. And when Gus and I were alone, I cried--for no reason
except the drink. He asked me why and I had to say something,
and it popped into my head to say I was ashamed of the life I
was leading. As things turned out, I'm glad I said it. He was
awfully impressed."

"Of course," said Susan.

"You never saw anything like it," continued Etta with an
expression suggesting a feeling that she ought to be ashamed but
could not help being amused. "He acted differently right away.
Why don't you try it on John?"

"What for?"

"Oh, it'll make him--make him have more--more respect for you."
"Perhaps," said Susan indifferently.

"Don't you want John to--to respect you?"

"I've been too busy having a good time to think much about
him--or about anything. I'm tired of thinking. I want to rest.
Last night was the first time in my life I danced as much as I
wanted to."

"Don't you like John?"

"Certainly."

"He does know a lot, doesn't he? He's like you. He reads and and
thinks--and---- He's away ahead of Fatty except---- You don't
mind my having the man with the most money?"

"Not in the least," laughed Susan. "Money's another thing I'm
glad to rest from thinking about."

"But this'll last only a few days longer. And--If you managed
John Redmond right, Lorna----"

"Now--you must not try to make me think."

"Lorna--are you _really_ happy?"

"Can't you see I am?"

"Yes--when we're all together. But when--when you're alone with
him----"

Susan's expression stopped her. It was a laughing expression;
and yet--Said Susan: "I am happy, dear--very happy. I eat and
drink and sleep--and I am, oh, so glad to be alive."

"_Isn't_ it good to be alive!--if you've got plenty," exclaimed
Etta. "I never knew before. _This_ is the dream, Lorna--and I
think I'll kill myself if I have to wake."

On Saturday afternoon the four were in one of the rooms
discussing where the farewell dinner should be held and what
they would eat and drink. Etta called Susan into the other room
and shut the door between.

"Fatty wants me to go along with him and live in Detroit," said
she, blurting it out as if confessing a crime.

"Isn't that splendid!" cried Susan, kissing her. "I thought he
would. He fell in love with you at first sight."

"That's what he says. But, Lorna--I--I don't know _what_ to do!"

"_Do_? Why, go. What else is there? Go, of course."

"Oh, no, Lorna," protested Etta. "I couldn't leave you. I
couldn't get along without you."

"But you must go. Don't you love him?"

Etta began to weep. "That's the worst of it. I do love him so!
And I think he loves me--and might marry me and make me a good
woman again. . . . You mustn't ever tell John or anybody about
that--that dreadful man I went with--will you, dear?"

"What do you take me for?" said Susan.

"I've told Fatty I was a good girl until I met him. You haven't
told John about yourself?" Susan shook her head.

"I suppose not. You're so secretive. You really think I ought to go?"

"I know it."

Etta was offended by Susan's positive, practical tone. "I don't
believe you care."

"Yes, I care," said Susan. "But you're right to follow the man
you love. Besides, there's nothing so good in sight here."

"What'll _you_ do? Oh, I can't go, Lorna!"

"Now, Etta," said Susan calmly, "don't talk nonsense. I'll get
along all right."

"You come to Detroit. You could find a job there, and we could
live together."

"Would Fatty like that?"

Etta flushed and glanced away. Young Gulick had soon decided
that Susan was the stronger--therefore, the less "womanly"--of
the two girls, and must be the evil influence over her whom he
had appeared just in time to save. When he said this to Etta,
she protested--not very vigorously, because she wished him to
think her really almost innocent. She wasn't _quite_ easy in her
mind as to whether she had been loyal to Lorna. But, being
normally human, she soon _almost_ convinced herself that but for
Lorna she never would have made the awful venture. Anyhow, since
it would help her with Gulick and wouldn't do Lorna the least
mite of harm, why not let him think he was right?

Said Susan: "Hasn't he been talking to you about getting away
from--from all this?"

"But I don't care," cried Etta, moved to an outburst of
frankness by her sense of security in Susan's loyalty and
generosity. "He doesn't understand. Men are fools about women.
He thinks he likes in me what I haven't got at all. As a matter
of fact if I had been what he made me tell him I was, why we'd
never have met--or got acquainted in the way that makes us so
fond of each other. And I owe it all to you, Lorna. I don't care
what he says, Lorna--or does. I want you."

"Can't go," said Susan, not conscious--yet not unaware,
either--of the curious mixture of heart and art in Etta's
outburst of apparent eagerness to risk everything for love of
her. "Can't possibly go. I've made other plans. The thing for
you is to be straight--get some kind of a job in Detroit--make
Fatty marry you--quick!"

"He would, but his father'd throw him out."

"Not if you were an honest working girl."

"But----" Etta was silent and reflective for a moment. "Men are
so queer," she finally said. "If I'd been an honest working girl
he'd never have noticed me. It's because I am what I am that
I've been able to get acquainted with him and fascinate him. And
he feels it's a sporty thing to do--to marry a fast girl. If I
was to settle down to work, be a regular working girl--why, I'm
afraid he--he'd stop loving me. Then, too, he likes to believe
he's rescuing me from a life of shame. I've watched him close.
I understand him."

"No doubt," said Susan drily.

"Oh, I know you think I'm deceitful. But a woman's got to be,
with a man. And I care a lot about him--aside from the fact that
he can make me comfortable and--and protect me from--from the
streets. If you cared for a man--No, I guess you wouldn't. You
oughtn't to be so--so _honest_, Lorna. It'll always do you up."

Susan laughed, shrugged her shoulders. "I am what I am," said
she. "I can't be any different. If I tried, I'd only fail worse."

"You don't love John--do you?"

"I like him."

"Then you wouldn't have to do _much_ pretending," urged Etta.
"And what does a little pretending amount to?"

"That's what I say to myself," replied Susan thoughtfully.

"It isn't nearly as bad as--as what we started out to do."

Susan laughed at Etta's little hypocrisy for her
respectability's comfort. "As what we did--and are doing,"
corrected she. Burlingham had taught her that it only makes
things worse and more difficult to lie to oneself about them.

"John's crazy about you. But he hasn't money enough to ask you
to come along. And----" Etta hesitated, eyed Susan doubtfully.
"You're _sure_ you don't love him?"

"No. I couldn't love him any more than--than I could hate him."
Susan's strange look drifted across her features. "It's very
queer, how I feel toward men. But--I don't love him and I shan't
pretend. I want to, but somehow--I can't."

Etta felt that she could give herself the pleasure of
unburdening herself of a secret. "Then I may as well tell you,
he's engaged to a girl he thinks he ought to marry."

"I suspected so."

"And you don't mind?" inquired Etta, unable to read Susan's
queer expression.

"Except for him--and her--a little," replied Susan. "I guess
that's why I haven't liked him better--haven't trusted him at all."

"Aren't men dreadful! And he is so nice in many ways. . . .
Lorna----" Etta was weeping again. "I can't go--I can't. I
mustn't leave you."

"Don't be absurd. You've simply got to do it."

"And I do love him," said Etta, calmed again by Susan's
calmness. "And if he married me--Oh, how grateful I'd be!"

"I should say!" exclaimed Susan. She kissed Etta and petted her.
"And he'll have a mighty good wife."

"Do you think I can marry him?"

"If you love him--and don't worry about catching him."

Etta shook her head in rejection of this piece of idealistic advice.
"But a girl's got to be shrewd. You ought to be more so, Lorna."

"That depends on what a girl wants," said Susan, absently. "Upon
what she wants," she repeated.

"What do _you_ want?" inquired Etta curiously.

"I don't know," Susan answered slowly.

"I wish I knew what was going on in your head!" exclaimed Etta.

"So do I," said Susan, smiling.

"Do you really mind my going? Really--honestly?"

There wasn't a flaw in Susan's look or tone. "If you tried to
stay with me, I'd run away from you."

"And if I do get him, I can help you. Once he's mine----" Etta
rounded out her sentence with an expression of countenance which
it was well her adoring rescuer did not see. Not that it lacked
womanliness; "womanly" is the word that most exactly describes
it--and always will exactly describe such expressions--and the
thoughts behind--so long as men compel women to be just women,
under penalty of refusing them support if they are not so.

Redmond came in, and Etta left him alone with Susan. "Well, has
Etta told you?" he asked.

"Yes," replied the girl. She looked at him--simply a look, but
the violet-gray eyes had an unusual seeming of seeing into minds
and hearts, an expression that was perhaps the more disquieting
because it was sympathetic rather than critical.

His glance shifted. He was a notably handsome young fellow--too
young for any display of character in his face, or for any
development of it beyond the amiable, free and easy lover of a
jolly good time that is the type repeated over and over again
among the youth of the comfortable classes that send their sons
to college.

"Are you going with her?" he asked.

"No," said Susan.

Redmond's face fell. "I hoped you liked me a little better than
that," said he.

"It isn't a question of you."

"But it's a question of _you_ with me," he cried. "I'm in love
with you, Lorna. I'm--I'm tempted to say all sorts of crazy
things that I think but haven't the courage to act on." He
kneeled down beside her, put his arms round her waist. "I'm
crazy about you, Lorna.

. . . Tell me--Were you--Had you been--before we met?"

"Yes," said Susan.

"Why don't you deny it?" he exclaimed. "Why don't you fool me,
as Etta fooled Gus?"

"Etta's story is different from mine," said Susan. "She's had no
experience at all, compared to me."

"I don't believe it," declared he. "I know she's been stuffing
Fatty, has made him think that you led her away. But I can soon
knock those silly ideas out of his silly head----"

"It's the truth," interrupted Susan, calmly.

"No matter. You could be a good woman." Impulsively, "If you'll
settle down and be a good woman, I'll marry you."

Susan smiled gently. "And ruin your prospects?"

"I don't care for prospects beside you. You _are_ a good
woman--inside. The better I know you the less like a fast woman
you are. Won't you go to work, Lorna, and wait for me?"

Her smile had a little mockery in it now--perhaps to hide from
him how deeply she was moved. "No matter what else I did, I'd
not wait for you, Johnny. You'd never come. You're not a
Johnny-on-the-spot."

"You think I'm weak--don't you?" he said. Then, as she did not
answer, "Well, I am. But I love you, all the same."

For the first time he felt that he had touched her heart. The
tears sprang to her eyes, which were not at all gray now but all
violet, as was their wont when she was deeply moved. She laid
her hands on his shoulders. "Oh, it's so good to be loved!" she
murmured.

He put his arms around her, and for the moment she rested there,
content--yes, content, as many a woman who needed love less and
craved it less has been content just with being loved, when to
make herself content she has had to ignore and forget the
personality of the man who was doing the loving--and the kind of
love it was. Said he:

"Don't you love me a little enough to be a good woman and wait
till I set up in the law?"

She let herself play with the idea, to prolong this novel
feeling of content. She asked, "How long will that be?"

"I'll be admitted in two years. I'll soon have a practice. My
father's got influence."

Susan looked at him sadly, slowly shook her head. "Two
years--and then several years more. And I working in a
factory--or behind a counter--from dawn till after dark--poor,
hungry--half-naked--wearing my heart out--wearing my body
away----" She drew away from him, laughed. "I was fooling,
John--about marrying. I liked to hear you say those things. I
couldn't marry you if I would. I'm married already."

"_You_!"

She nodded.

"Tell me about it--won't you?"

She looked at him in astonishment, so amazing seemed the idea
that she could tell anyone that experience. It would be like
voluntarily showing a hideous, repulsive scar or wound, for
sometimes it was scar, and sometimes open wound, and always the
thing that made whatever befell her endurable by comparison.

She did not answer his appeal for her confidence but went on,
"Anyhow, nothing could induce me to go to work again. You don't
realize what work means--the only sort of work I can get to do.
It's--it's selling both body and soul. I prefer----"

He kissed her to stop her from finishing her sentence.
"Don't--please," he pleaded. "You don't understand. In this life
you'll soon grow hard and coarse and lose your beauty and your
health--and become a moral and physical wreck."

She reflected, the grave expression in her eyes--the expression
that gave whoever saw it the feeling of dread as before
impending tragedy. "Yes--I suppose so," she said. "But----Any
sooner than as a working girl living in a dirty hole in a
tenement? No--not so soon. And in this life I've got a chance if
I'm careful of my health and--and don't let things touch _me_. In
that other--there's no chance--none!"

"What chance have you got in this life?"

"I don't know exactly. I'm very ignorant yet. At worst, it's
simply that I've got no chance in either life--and this life is
more comfortable."

"Comfortable! With men you don't like frightful men----"

"Were you ever cold?" asked Susan.

But it made no impression upon him who had no conception of the
cold that knows not how it is ever to get warm again. He rushed on:

"Lorna, my God!" He caught hold of her and strained her to his
breast. "You are lovely and sweet! It's frightful--you in this life."

Her expression made the sobs choke up into his throat. She said
quietly: "Not worse than dirt and vermin and freezing cold and
long, long, dull--oh, _so_ dull hours of working among human
beings that don't ever wash--because they can't." She pushed him
gently away. "You don't understand. You haven't been through it.
Comfortable people talk like fools about those things. . . . Do
you remember my hands that first evening?"

He reddened and his eyes shifted. "I'm absurdly sensitive about
a woman's hands," he muttered.

She laughed at him. "Oh, I saw--how you couldn't bear to look at
them--how they made you shiver. Well, the hands were
nothing--_nothing_!--beside what you didn't see."

"Lorna, do you love someone else?"

His eyes demanded an honest answer, and it seemed to her his
feeling for her deserved it. But she could not put the answer
into words. She lowered her gaze.

"Then why----" he began impetuously. But there he halted, for he
knew she would not lift the veil over herself, over her past.

"I'm very, very fond of you," she said with depressing
friendliness. Then with a sweet laugh, "You ought to be glad I'm
not able to take you at your word. And you will be glad soon."
She sighed. "What a good time we've had!"

"If I only had a decent allowance, like Fatty!" he groaned.

"No use talking about that. It's best for us to separate best
for us both. You've been good to me--you'll never know how good.
And I can't play you a mean trick. I wish I could be selfish
enough to do it, but I can't."

"You don't love me. That's the reason."

"Maybe it is. Yes, I guess that's why I've got the courage to be
square with you. Anyhow, John, you can't afford to care for me.
And if I cared for you, and put off the parting--why it'd only
put off what I've got to go through with before----" She did not
finish; her eyes became dreamy.

"Before what?" he asked.

"I don't know," she said, returning with a sigh. "Something I
see--yet don't see in the darkness, ahead of me."

"I can't make you out," cried he. Her expression moved him to
the same awe she inspired in Etta--a feeling that gave both of
them the sense of having known her better, of having been more
intimate with her when they first met her than they ever had
been since or ever would be again.

When Redmond embraced and kissed her for the last time, he was
in another and less sympathetic mood, was busy with his own
wounds to vanity and perhaps to heart. He thought her
heartless--good and sweet and friendly, but without sentiment.
She refused to help him make a scene; she refused to say she
would write to him, and asked him not to write to her. "You know
we'll probably see each other soon."

"Not till the long vacation--not till nearly July."

"Only three months."

"Oh, if you look at it that way!" said he, piqued and sullen.
Girls had always been more than kind, more than eager, when he
had shown interest.

Etta, leaving on a later train, was even more depressed about
Susan's heart. She wept hysterically, wished Susan to do the
same; but Susan stood out firmly against a scene, and would not
have it that Etta was shamefully deserting her, as Etta
tearfully accused herself. "You're going to be happy," she
said. "And I'm not so selfish as to be wretched about it. And
don't you worry a minute on my account. I'm better off in every
way than I've ever been. I'll get on all right."

"I know you gave up John to help me with August. I know you mean
to break off everything. Oh, Lorna, you mustn't--you mustn't."

"Don't talk nonsense," was Susan's unsatisfactory reply.

When it came down to the last embrace and the last kiss, Etta
did feel through Susan's lips and close encircling arms a
something that dried up her hysterical tears and filled her
heart with an awful aching. It did not last long. No matter how
wildly shallow waters are stirred, they soon calm and murmur
placidly on again. The three who had left her would have been
amazed could they have seen her a few minutes after Etta's train
rolled out of the Union Station. The difference between strong
natures and weak is not that the strong are free from cowardice
and faint-heartedness, from doubt and foreboding, from love and
affection, but that they do not stay down when they are crushed
down, stagger up and on.

Susan hurried to the room they had helped her find the day
before--a room in a house where no questions were asked or
answered. She locked herself in and gave way to the agonies of
her loneliness. And when her grief had exhausted her, she lay
upon the bed staring at the wall with eyes that looked as though
her soul had emptied itself through them of all that makes life
endurable, even of hope. For the first time in her life she
thought of suicide--not suicide the vague possibility, not
suicide the remote way of escape, but suicide the close and
intimate friend, the healer of all woes, the solace of all
griefs--suicide, the speedy, accurate solver of the worst
problem destiny can put to man.

She saw her pocketbook on the floor where she had dropped it.
"I'll wait till my money's gone," thought she. Then she
remembered Etta--how gentle and loving she was, how utterly she
gave herself--for Susan was still far from the profound
knowledge of character that enables us to disregard outward
signs in measuring actualities. "If I really weren't harder than
Etta," her thoughts ran on reproachfully, "I'd not wait until
the money went. I'd kill myself now, and have it over with." The
truth was that if the position of the two girls had been
reversed and Susan had loved Gulick as intensely as Etta
professed and believed she loved him, still Susan would have
given him up rather than have left Etta alone. And she would
have done it without any sense of sacrifice. And it must be
admitted that, whether or not there are those who deserve credit
for doing right, certainly those who do right simply because
they cannot do otherwise--the only trustworthy people--deserve
no credit for it.

She counted her money--twenty-three dollars in bills, and some
change. Redmond had given her fifty dollars each time they had
gone shopping, and had made her keep the balance--his indirect
way of adjusting the financial side. Twenty-three dollars meant
perhaps two weeks' living. Well, she would live those two weeks
decently and comfortably and then--bid life adieu unless
something turned up--for back to the streets she would not go.
With Etta gone, with not a friend anywhere on earth, life was
not worth the price she had paid for Etta and herself to the
drunken man. Her streak of good fortune in meeting Redmond had
given her no illusions; from Mabel Connemora, from what she
herself had heard and seen--and experienced--she knew the street
woman's life, and she could not live that life for herself
alone. She could talk about it to Redmond tranquilly. She could
think about it in the abstract, could see how other women did
it, and how those who had intelligence might well survive and
lift themselves up in it. But do it she could not. So she
resolved upon suicide, firmly believing in her own resolve. And
she was not one to deceive herself or to shrink from anything
whatsoever. Except the insane, only the young make these
resolves and act upon them; for the young have not yet learned
to value life, have not yet fallen under life's sinister spell
that makes human beings cling more firmly and more cravenly to
it as they grow older. The young must have something--some hope,
however fanatic and false--to live for. They will not tarry just
to live. And in that hour Susan had lost hope.

She took off her street dress and opened her trunk to get a
wrapper and bedroom slippers. As she lifted the lid, she saw an
envelope addressed "Lorna"; she remembered that Redmond had
locked and strapped the trunk. She tore the end from the
envelope, looked in. Some folded bills; nothing more. She sat on
the floor and counted two twenties, five tens, two fives--a
hundred dollars! She looked dazedly at the money--gave a cry of
delight--sprang to her feet, with a change like the startling
shift from night to day in the tropics.

"I can pay!" she cried. "I can pay!"

Bubbling over with smiles and with little laughs, gay as even
champagne and the release from the vile prison of the slums had
made her, she with eager hands took from the trunk her best
clothes--the jacket and skirt of dark gray check she had bought
for thirty dollars at Shillito's and had had altered to her
figure and her taste; the blouse of good quality linen with
rather a fancy collar; the gray leather belt with a big
oxidized silver buckle; her only pair of silk stockings; the
pair of high-heeled patent leather shoes--the large black hat
with a gray feather curling attractively round and over its
brim. The hat had cost only fourteen dollars because she had put
it together herself; if she had bought it made, she would have
paid not less than thirty dollars.

All these things she carefully unpacked and carefully laid out.
Then she thoroughly brushed her hair and did it up in a graceful
pompadour that would go well with the hat. She washed away the
traces of her outburst of grief, went over her finger nails, now
almost recovered from the disasters incident to the life of
manual labor. She went on to complete her toilet, all with the
same attention to detail--a sure indication, in one so young, of
a desire to please some specific person. When she had the hat
set at the satisfactory angle and the veil wound upon it and
draped over her fresh young face coquettishly, she took from her
slender store of gloves a fresh gray pair and, as she put them
on, stood before the glass examining herself.

There was now not a trace of the tenement working girl of a week
and a day before. Here was beauty in bloom, fresh and alluring
from head to narrow, well-booted feet. More than a hint of a
fine color sense--that vital quality, if fashion, the
conventional, is to be refined and individualized into style,
the rare--more than a hint of color sense showed in the harmony
of the pearl gray in the big feather, the pearl gray in the
collar of the blouse, and the pearl white of her skin. Susan had
indeed returned to her own class. She had left it, a small-town
girl with more than a suggestion of the child in eyes and mouth;
she had returned to it, a young woman of the city, with that
look in her face which only experience can give--experience that
has resulted in growth. She locked all her possessions away in
her trunk--all but her money; that she put in her
stockings--seventy-five dollars well down in the right leg, the
rest of the bills well down in the left leg; the two dollars or
so in change was all she intrusted to the pocketbook she
carried. She cast a coquettish glance down at her charmingly
arrayed feet--a harmless glance of coquetry that will be
condemned by those whose physical vanity happens to center
elsewhere. After this glance she dropped her skirts--and was ready.

By this time dusk had fallen, and it was nearly six o'clock. As
she came out of the house she glanced toward the west--the
instinctive gesture of people who live in rainy climates. Her
face brightened; she saw an omen in the long broad streak of
reddened evening sky.

                         CHAPTER XXIII

SHE went down to Fourth Street, along it to Race, to the
_Commercial_ building. At the entrance to the corridor at the far
side of which were elevator and stairway, she paused and
considered. She turned into the business office.

"Is Mr. Roderick Spenser here?" she asked of a heavily built,
gray-bearded man in the respectable black of the old-fashioned
financial employee, showing the sobriety and stolidity of his
character in his dress.

"He works upstairs," replied the old man, beaming approvingly
upon the pretty, stylish young woman.

"Is he there now?"

"I'll telephone." He went into the rear office, presently
returned with the news that Mr. Spenser had that moment left,
was probably on his way down in the elevator. "And you'll catch
him if you go to the office entrance right away."

Susan, the inexperienced in the city ways of men with women, did
not appreciate what a tribute to her charms and to her
character, as revealed in the honest, grave eyes, was the old
man's unhesitating assumption that Spenser would wish to see
her. She lost no time in retracing her steps. As she reached the
office entrance she saw at the other end of the long hall two
young men coming out of the elevator. After the habit of youth,
she had rehearsed speech and manner for this meeting; but at
sight of him she was straightway trembling so that she feared
she would be unable to speak at all. The entrance light was dim,
but as he glanced at her in passing he saw her looking at him
and his hand moved toward his hat. His face had not changed--the
same frank, careless expression, the same sympathetic,
understanding look out of the eyes. But he was the city man in
dress now--notably the city man.

"Mr. Spenser," said she shyly.

He halted; his companion went on. He lifted his hat, looked
inquiringly at her--the look of the enthusiast and connoisseur
on the subject of pretty women, when he finds a new specimen
worthy of his attention.

"Don't you know me?"

His expression of puzzled and flirtatious politeness gradually
cleared away. The lighting up of his eyes, the smile round his
mouth delighted her; and she grew radiant when he exclaimed
eagerly, "Why, it's the little girl of the rock again! How
you've grown--in a year--less than a year!"

"Yes, I suppose I have," said she, thinking of it for the first
time. Then, to show him at once what a good excuse she had for
intruding again, she hastened to add, "I've come to pay you that
money you loaned me."

He burst out laughing, drew her into the corridor where the
light was brighter. "And you've gone back to your husband," he
said--she noted the quick, sharp change in his voice.

"Why do you think that?" she said.

The way his eyes lingered upon the charming details toilet that
indicated anything but poverty might of a have given her a
simple explanation. He offered another.

"I can't explain. It's your different expression--a kind of
experienced look."

The color flamed and flared in Susan's face.

"You are--happy?" he asked.

"I've not seen--him," evaded she. "Ever since I left Carrollton
I've been wandering about."

"Wandering about?" he repeated absently, his eyes busy with
her appearance.

"And now," she went on, nervous and hurried, "I'm here in
town--for a while."

"Then I may come to see you?"

"I'd be glad. I'm alone in a furnished room I've taken--out near
Lincoln Park."

"Alone! You don't mean you're still wandering?"

"Still wandering."

He laughed. "Well, it certainly is doing you no harm. The
reverse." An embarrassed pause, then he said with returning
politeness: "Maybe you'll dine with me this evening?"

She beamed. "I've been hoping you'd ask me."

"It won't be as good as the one on the rock."

"There never will be another dinner like that," declared she.
"Your leg is well?"

Her question took him by surprise. In his interest and wonder as
to the new mystery of this mysterious young person he had not
recalled the excuses he made for dropping out of the
entanglement in which his impulses had put him. The color poured
into his face. "Ages ago," he replied, hurriedly. "I'd have
forgotten it, if it hadn't been for you. I've never been able to
get you out of my head." And as a matter of truth she had
finally dislodged his cousin Nell--without lingering long or
vividly herself. Young Mr. Spenser was too busy and too
self-absorbed a man to bother long about any one flower in a
world that was one vast field abloom with open-petaled flowers.

"Nor I you," said she, as pleased as he had expected, and
showing it with a candor that made her look almost the child he
had last seen. "You see, I owed you that money, and I wanted to
pay it."

"Oh--_that_ was all!" exclaimed he, half jokingly. "Wait here a
minute." And he went to the door, looked up and down the street,
then darted across it and disappeared into the St. Nicholas
Hotel. He was not gone more than half a minute.

"I had to see Bayne and tell him," he explained when he was with
her again. "I was to have dined with him and some others--over
in the cafe. Instead, you and I will dine upstairs. You won't
mind my not being dressed?"

It seemed to her he was dressed well enough for any occasion.
"I'd rather you had on the flannel trousers rolled up to your
knees," said she. "But I can imagine them."

"What a dinner that was!" cried he. "And the ride afterward,"
with an effort at ease that escaped her bedazzled eyes. "Why
didn't you ever write?"

He expected her to say that she did not know his address, and
was ready with protests and excuses. But she replied:

"I didn't have the money to pay what I owed you." They were
crossing Fourth Street and ascending the steps to the hotel.
"Then, too--afterward--when I got to know a little more about
life I----Oh, no matter. Really, the money was the only reason."

But he had stopped short. In a tone so correctly sincere that a
suspicious person might perhaps have doubted the sincerity of
the man using it, he said:

"What was in your mind? What did you think? What did
you--suspect me of? For I see in that honest, telltale face of
yours that it was a suspicion."

"I didn't blame you," protested the girl, "even if it was so. I
thought maybe you got to thinking it over--and--didn't want to be
bothered with anyone so troublesome as I had made myself."

"How _could_ you suspect _me_ of such a thing?"

"Oh, I really didn't," declared she, with all the earnestness of
a generous nature, for she read into his heightened color and
averted eyes the feelings she herself would have had before an
unjust suspicion. "It was merely an idea. And I didn't blame
you--not in the least. It would have been the sensible----"

Next thing, this child-woman, this mysterious mind of mixed
precocity and innocence, would be showing that she had guessed
a Cousin Nell.

"You are far too modest," interrupted he with a flirtatious
smile. "You didn't realize how strong an impression you made.
No, I really broke my leg. Don't you suppose I knew the
twenty-five in the pocketbook wouldn't carry you far?" He
saw--and naturally misunderstood--her sudden change of
expression as he spoke of the amount. He went on apologetically,
"I intended to bring more when I came. I was afraid to put money
in the note for fear it'd never be delivered, if I did. And
didn't I tell you to write--and didn't I give you my address
here? Would I have done that, if I hadn't meant to stand by you?"

Susan was convinced, was shamed by these smooth, plausible
assertions and explanations. "Your father's house--it's a big
brick, with stone trimmings, standing all alone outside the
little town--isn't it?"

Spenser was again coloring deeply. "Yes," admitted he uneasily.

But Susan didn't notice. "I saw the doctor--and your family--on
the veranda," she said.

He was now so nervous that she could not but observe it. "They
gave out that it was only a sprain," said he, "because I told
them I didn't want it known. I didn't want the people at the
office to know I was going to be laid up so long. I was afraid
I'd lose my job."

"I didn't hear anything about it," said she. "I only saw as I
was going by on a boat."

He looked disconcerted--but not to her eyes. "Well--it's far in
the past now," said he. "Let's forget--all but the fun."

"Yes--all but the fun." Then very sweetly, "But I'll never forget
what I owe you. Not the money--not that, hardly at all--but what
you did for me. It made me able to go on."

"Don't speak of it," cried he, flushed and shamefaced. "I didn't
do half what I ought." Like most human beings he was aware of
his more obvious--if less dangerous--faults and weaknesses. He
liked to be called generous, but always had qualms when so
called because he knew he was in fact of the familiar type
classed as generous only because human beings are so artless in
their judgments as to human nature that they cannot see that
quick impulses quickly die. The only deep truth is that there
are no generous natures but just natures--and they are rarely
classed as generous because their slowly formed resolves have
the air of prudence and calculation.

In the hotel she went to the dressing-room, took twenty-five
dollars from the money in her stocking. As soon as they were
seated in the restaurant she handed it to him.

"But this makes it you who are having me to dinner--and more,"
he protested.

"If you knew what a weight it's been on me, you'd not talk that
way," said she.

Her tone compelled him to accept her view of the matter. He
laughed and put the money in his waistcoat pocket, saying: "Then
I'll still owe you a dinner."

During the past week she had been absorbing as only a young
woman with a good mind and a determination to learn the business
of living can absorb. The lessons before her had been the life
that is lived in cities by those who have money to spend and
experience in spending it; she had learned out of all proportion
to opportunity. At a glance she realized that she was now in a
place far superior to the Bohemian resorts which had seemed to
her inexperience the best possible. From earliest childhood she
had shown the delicate sense of good taste and of luxury that
always goes with a practical imagination--practical as
distinguished from the idealistic kind of imagination that is
vague, erratic, and fond of the dreams which neither could nor
should come true. And the reading she had done--the novels, the
memoirs, the books of travel, the fashion and home
magazines--had made deep and distinct impressions upon her, had
prepared her--as they have prepared thousands of Americans in
secluded towns and rural regions where luxury and even comfort
are very crude indeed--for the possible rise of fortune that is
the universal American dream and hope. She felt these new
surroundings exquisitely--the subdued coloring, the softened
lights, the thick carpets, the quiet elegance and comfort of the
furniture. She noted the good manners of the well-trained
waiter; she listened admiringly and memorizingly as Spenser
ordered the dinner--a dinner of French good taste--small but
fine oysters, a thick soup, a guinea hen _en casserole_, a fruit
salad, fresh strawberry ice cream, dry champagne. She saw that
Spenser knew what he was about, and she was delighted with him
and proud to be with him and glad that he had tastes like her
own--that is, tastes such as she proposed to learn to have. Of
the men she had known or known about he seemed to her far and
away the best. It isn't necessary to explain into what an
attitude of mind and heart this feeling of his high superiority
immediately put her--certainly not for the enlightenment of any woman.

"What are you thinking?" he asked--the question that was so
often thrust at her because, when she thought intensely, there
was a curiosity-compelling expression in her eyes.

"Oh--about all this," replied she. "I like this sort of thing so
much. I never had it in my life, yet now that I see it I feel as
if I were part of it, as if it must belong to me." Her eyes met
his sympathetic gaze. "You understand, don't you?" He nodded.
"And I was wondering"--she laughed, as if she expected even him
to laugh at her--"I was wondering how long it would be before I
should possess it. Do you think I'm crazy?"

He shook his head. "I've got that same feeling," said he. "I'm
poor--don't dare do this often--have all I can manage in keeping
myself decently. Yet I have a conviction that I shall--shall
win. Don't think I'm dreaming of being rich--not at all. I--I
don't care much about that if I did go into business. But I want
all my surroundings to be right."

Her eyes gleamed. "And you'll get it. And so shall I. I know it
sounds improbable and absurd for me to say that about myself.
But--I know it."

"I believe you," said he. "You've got the look in your face--in
your eyes. . . . I've never seen anyone improve as you have in
this less than a year."

She smiled as she thought in what surroundings she had
apparently spent practically all that time. "If you could have
seen me!" she said. "Yes, I was learning and I know it. I led a
sort of double life. I----" she hesitated, gave up trying to
explain. She had not the words and phrases, the clear-cut ideas,
to express that inner life led by people who have real
imagination. With most human beings their immediate visible
surroundings determine their life; with the imaginative few
their horizon is always the whole wide world.

She sighed, "But I'm ignorant. I don't know how or where to
take hold."

"I can't help you there, yet," said he. "When we know each other
better, then I'll know. Not that you need me to tell you. You'll
find out for yourself. One always does."

She glanced round the attractive room again, then looked at him
with narrowed eyelids. "Only a few hours ago I was thinking of
suicide. How absurd it seems now!--I'll never do that again. At
least, I've learned how to profit by a lesson. Mr. Burlingham
taught me that."

"Who's he?"

"That's a long story. I don't feel like telling about it now."

But the mere suggestion had opened certain doors in her memory
and crowds of sad and bitter thoughts came trooping in.

"Are you in some sort of trouble?" said he, instantly leaning
toward her across the table and all aglow with the impulsive
sympathy that kindles in impressionable natures as quickly as
fire in dry grass. Such natures are as perfect conductors of
emotion as platinum is of heat--instantly absorbing it,
instantly throwing it off, to return to their normal and
metallic chill--and capacity for receptiveness. "Anything you
can tell me about?"

"Oh, no--nothing especial," replied she. "Just loneliness and a
feeling of--of discouragement." Strongly, "Just a mood. I'm
never really discouraged. Something always turns up."

"Please tell me what happened after I left you at that wretched hotel."

"I can't," she said. "At least, not now."

"There is----" He looked sympathetically at her, as if to assure
her that he would understand, no matter what she might confess.
"There is--someone?"

"No. I'm all alone. I'm--free." It was not in the least degree an
instinct for deception that made her then convey an impression
of there having been no one. She was simply obeying her innate
reticence that was part of her unusual self-unconsciousness.

"And you're not worried about--about money matters?" he asked.
"You see, I'm enough older and more experienced to give me
excuse for asking. Besides, unless a woman has money, she
doesn't find it easy to get on."

"I've enough for the present," she assured him, and the stimulus
of the champagne made her look--and feel--much more
self-confident than she really was. "More than I've ever had
before. So I'm not worried. When anyone has been through what I
have they aren't so scared about the future."

He looked the admiration he felt--and there was not a little of
the enthusiasm of the champagne both in the look and in the
admiration--"I see you've already learned to play the game
without losing your nerve."

"I begin to hope so," said she.

"Yes--you've got the signs of success in your face. Curious
about those signs. Once you learn to know them, you never miss
in sizing up people."

The dinner had come. Both were hungry, and it was as good a
dinner as the discussion about it between Spenser and the waiter
had forecast. As they ate the well-cooked, well-served food and
drank the delicately flavored champagne, mellow as the gorgeous
autumn its color suggested, there diffused through them an
extraordinary feeling of quiet intense happiness--happiness of
mind and body. Her face took on a new and finer beauty; into his
face came a tenderness that was most becoming to its rather
rugged features. And he had not talked with her long before he
discovered that he was facing not a child, not a childwoman, but
a woman grown, one who could understand and appreciate the
things men and women of experience say and do.

"I've always been expecting to hear from you every day since we
separated," he said--and he was honestly believing it now. "I've
had a feeling that you hadn't forgotten me. It didn't seem
possible I could feel so strongly unless there was real sympathy
between us."

"I came as soon as I could."

He reflected in silence a moment, then in a tone that made her
heart leap and her blood tingle, he said: "You say you're free?"

"Free as air. Only--I couldn't fly far."

He hesitated on an instinct of prudence, then ventured. "Far as
New York?"

"What is the railroad fare?"

"Oh, about twenty-five dollars--with sleeper."

"Yes--I can fly that far."

"Do you mean to say you've no ties of any kind?"

"None. Not one." Her eyes opened wide and her nostrils dilated. "Free!"

"You love it--don't you?"

"Don't you?"

"Above everything!" he exclaimed. "Only the free _live_."

She lifted her head higher in a graceful, attractive gesture of
confidence and happiness. "Well--I am ready to live."

"I'm afraid you don't realize," he said hesitatingly. "People
wouldn't understand. You've your reputation to think of, you know."

She looked straight at him. "No--not even that. I'm even free
from reputation." Then, as his face saddened and his eyes
glistened with sympathy, "You needn't pity me. See where it's
brought me."

"You're a strong swimmer--aren't you?" he said tenderly. "But
then there isn't any safe and easy crossing to the isles of
freedom. It's no wonder most people don't get further than
gazing and longing."

"Probably I shouldn't," confessed Susan, "if I hadn't been
thrown into the water. It was a case of swim or drown."

"But most who try are drowned--nearly all the women."

"Oh, I guess there are more survive than is generally supposed.
So much lying is done about that sort of thing."

"What a shrewd young lady it is! At any rate, you have reached
the islands."

"But I'm not queen of them yet," she reminded him. "I'm only a
poor, naked, out-of-breath castaway lying on the beach."

He laughed appreciatively. Very clever, this extremely pretty
young woman. "Yes--you'll win. You'll be queen." He lifted his
champagne glass and watched the little bubbles pushing gayly and
swiftly upward. "So--you've cast over your reputation."

"I told you I had reached the beach naked." A reckless light in
her eyes now. "Fact is, I had none to start with. Anybody has a
reason for starting--or for being started. That was mine, I guess."

"I've often thought about that matter of reputation--in a man or
a woman--if they're trying to make the bold, strong swim. To
care about one's reputation means fear of what the world says.
It's important to care about one's character--for without
character no one ever got anywhere worth getting to. But it's
very, very dangerous to be afraid for one's reputation. And--I
hate to admit it, because I'm hopelessly conventional at bottom,
but it's true--reputation--fear of what the world says--has sunk
more swimmers, has wrecked more characters than it ever helped.
So--the strongest and best swimmers swim naked."

Susan was looking thoughtfully at him over the rim of her glass.
She took a sip of the champagne, said: "If I hadn't been quite
naked, I'd have sunk--I'd have been at the bottom--with the
fishes----"

"Don't!" he cried. "Thank God, you did whatever you've
done--yes, I mean that--whatever you've done, since it enabled
you to swim on." He added, "And I know it wasn't anything
bad--anything unwomanly."

"I did the best I could--nothing I'm ashamed of--or proud of
either. Just--what I had to do."

"But you ought to be proud that you arrived."

"No--only glad," said she. "So--so _frightfully_ glad!"

In any event, their friendship was bound to flourish; aided by
that dinner and that wine it sprang up into an intimacy, a
feeling of mutual trust and of sympathy at every point. Like all
women she admired strength in a man above everything else. She
delighted in the thick obstinate growth of his fair hair, in the
breadth of the line of his eyebrows, in the aggressive thrust of
his large nose and long jawbone. She saw in the way his mouth
closed evidence of a will against which opposition would dash
about as dangerously as an egg against a stone wall. There was
no question of his having those birthmarks of success about
which he talked. She saw them--saw nothing of the less
obtrusive--but not less important--marks of weakness which might
have enabled an expert in the reading of faces to reach some
rather depressing conclusion as to the nature and the degree of
that success.

Finally, he burst out with, "Yes, I've made up my mind. I'll do
it! I'm going to New York. I've been fooling away the last five
years here learning a lot, but still idling--drinking--amusing
myself in all kinds of ways. And about a month ago--one night,
as I was rolling home toward dawn--through a driving sleet
storm--do you remember a line in `Paradise Lost'"

"I never read it," interrupted Susan.

"Well--it's where the devils have been kicked out of Heaven and
are lying in agony flat on the burning lake--and Satan rises
up--and marches haughtily out among them--and calls out, `Awake!
Arise! Or forever more be damned!' That's what has happened to
me several times in my life. When I was a boy, idling about the
farm and wasting myself, that voice came to me--`Awake! Arise!
Or forever more be damned!' And I got a move on me, and insisted
on going to college. Again--at college--I became a
dawdler--poker--drink--dances--all the rest of it. And suddenly
that voice roared in my ears, made me jump like a rabbit when a
gun goes off. And last month it came again. I went to
work--finished a play I've been pottering over for three years.
But somehow I couldn't find the--the--whatever I needed--to make
me break away. Well--_you've_ given me that. I'll resign from the
_Commercial_ and with all I've got in the world--three hundred
dollars and a trunk full of good clothes, I'll break into Broadway."

Susan had listened with bright eyes and quickened breath, as
intoxicated and as convinced as was he by his eloquence.
"Isn't that splendid!" she exclaimed in a low voice.

"And you?" he said meaningly.

"I?" she replied, fearing she was misunderstanding.

"Will you go?"

"Do you want me?" she asked, low and breathlessly.

With a reluctance which suggested--but not to her--that his
generosity was winning a hard-fought battle with his vanity, he
replied: "I need you. I doubt if I'd dare, without you to back
me up."

"I've got a trunk full of fairly good clothes and about a
hundred dollars. But I haven't got any play--or any art--or any
trade even. Of course, I'll go." Then she hastily added, "I'll
not be a drag on you. I pay my own way."

"But you mustn't be suspicious in your independence," he warned
her. "You mustn't forget that I'm older than you and more
experienced and that it's far easier for a man to get money than
for a woman."

"To get it without lowering himself?"

"Ah!" he exclaimed, looking strangely at her. "You mean, without
bowing to some boss? Without selling his soul? I had no idea you
were so much of a woman when I met you that day."

"I wasn't--then," replied she. "And I didn't know where I'd got
till we began to talk this evening."

"And you're very young!"

"Oh, but I've been going to a school where they make you learn fast."

"Indeed I do need you." He touched his glass to hers. "On to
Broadway!" he cried.

"Broadway!" echoed she, radiant.

"Together--eh?"

She nodded. But as she drank the toast a tear splashed into her
glass. She was remembering how some mysterious instinct had
restrained her from going with John Redmond, though it seemed
the only sane thing to do. What if she had disobeyed that
instinct! And then--through her mind in swift ghostly march--past
trailed the persons and events of the days just gone--just gone,
yet seeming as far away as a former life in another world.
Redmond and Gulick--Etta--yes, Etta, too--all past and
gone--forever gone----

"What are you thinking about?"

She shook her head and the spectral procession vanished into the
glooms of memory's vistas. "Thinking?--of yesterday. I don't
understand myself--how I shake off and forget what's past.
Nothing seems real to me but the future."

"Not even the present?" said he with a smile.

"Not even the present," she answered with grave candor. "Nothing
seems to touch me--the real me. It's like--like looking out of
the window of the train at the landscape running by. I'm a
traveler passing through. I wonder if it'll always be that way.
I wonder if I'll ever arrive where I'll feel that I belong."

"I think so--and soon."

But she did not respond to his confident smile. "I--I hope so,"
she said with sad, wistful sweetness. "Then again--aren't there
some people who don't belong anywhere--aren't allowed to settle
down and be happy, but have to keep going--on and on--until----"

"Until they pass out into the dark," he finished for her. "Yes."
He looked at her in a wondering uneasy way. "You do suggest that
kind," said he. "But," smilingly, to hide his earnestness, "I'll
try to detain you."

"Please do," she said. "I don't want to go on--alone."

He dropped into silence, puzzled and in a way awed by the
mystery enveloping her--a mystery of aloofness and stoniness, of
complete separation from the contact of the world--the mystery
that incloses all whose real life is lived deep within themselves.

                         CHAPTER XXIV

LIKE days later, on the Eastern Express, they were not so
confident as they had been over the St. Nicholas champagne. As
confident about the remoter future, it was that annoying little
stretch near at hand which gave them secret uneasiness. There
had been nothing but dreaming and sentimentalizing in those four
days--and that disquietingly suggested the soldier who with an
impressive flourish highly resolves to give battle, then
sheathes his sword and goes away to a revel. Also, like all
idlers, they had spent money--far more money than total net cash
resources of less than five hundred dollars warranted.

"We've spent an awful lot of money," said Susan.

She was quick to see the faint frown, the warning that she was
on dangerous ground. Said he:

"Do you regret?"

"No, indeed--no!" cried she, eager to have that cloud vanish,
but honest too.

She no more than he regretted a single moment of the dreaming
and love-making, a single penny of the eighty and odd dollars
that had enabled them fittingly to embower their romance, to
twine myrtle in their hair and to provide Cupid's torch-bowls
with fragrant incense. Still--with the battle not begun, there
gaped that deep, wide hollow in the war chest.

Spenser's newspaper connection got them passes over one of the
cheaper lines to New York--and he tried to console himself by
setting this down as a saving of forty dollars against the
eighty dollars of the debit item. But he couldn't altogether
forget that they would have traveled on passes, anyhow. He was
not regretting that he had indulged in the extravagance of a
stateroom--but he couldn't deny that it was an extravagance.
However, he had only to look at her to feel that he had done
altogether well in providing for her the best, and to believe
that he could face with courage any fate so long as he had her
at his side.

"Yes, I can face anything with you," he said. "What I feel for
you is the real thing. The real thing, at last."

She had no disposition to inquire curiously into this. Her reply
was a flash of a smile that was like a flash of glorious light
upon the crest of a wave surging straight from her happy heart.

They were opposite each other at breakfast in the restaurant
car. He delighted in her frank delight in the novelty of
travel--swift and luxurious travel. He had never been East
before, himself, but he had had experience of sleepers and
diners; she had not, and every moment she was getting some new
sensation. She especially enjoyed this sitting at breakfast with
the express train rushing smoothly along through the
mountains--the first mountains either had seen. At times they
were so intensely happy that they laughed with tears in their
eyes and touched hands across the table to get from physical
contact the reassurances of reality.

"How good to eat everything is!" she exclaimed. "You'll think me
very greedy, I'm afraid. But if you'd eaten the stuff I have
since we dined on the rock!"

They were always going back to the rock, and neither wearied of
recalling and reminding each other of the smallest details. It
seemed to them that everything, even the least happening, at
that sacred spot must be remembered, must be recorded indelibly
in the book of their romance. "I'm glad we were happy together in
such circumstances," she went on. "It was a test--wasn't it, Rod?"

"If two people don't love each other enough to be happy
anywhere, they could be happy nowhere," declared he.

"So, we'll not mind being very, very careful about spending
money in New York," she ventured--for she was again bringing up
the subject she had been privately revolving ever since they had
formed the partnership. In her wanderings with Burlingham, in
her sojourn in the tenements, she had learned a great deal about
the care and spending of money--had developed that instinct for
forehandedness which nature has implanted in all normal women
along with the maternal instinct--and as a necessary supplement
to it. This instinct is more or less futile in most women
because they are more or less ignorant of the realities as to wise
and foolish expenditure. But it is found in the most extravagant
women no less than in the most absurdly and meanly stingy.

"Of course, we must be careful," assented Rod. "But I can't let
you be uncomfortable."

"Now, dear," she remonstrated, "you mustn't treat me that way.
I'm better fitted for hardship than you. I'd mind it less."

He laughed; she looked so fine and delicate, with her
transparent skin and her curves of figure, he felt that anything
so nearly perfect could not but easily be spoiled. And there he
showed how little he appreciated her iron strength, her almost
exhaustless endurance. He fancied he was the stronger because he
could have crushed her in his muscular arms. But exposures,
privations, dissipations that would have done for a muscularly
stronger man than he would have left no trace upon her after a
few days of rest and sleep.

"It's the truth," she insisted. "I could prove it, but I shan't.
I don't want to remember vividly. Rod, we _must_ live cheaply in
New York until you sell a play and I have a place in some company."

"Yes," he conceded. "But, Susie, not too cheap. A cheap way of
living makes a cheap man--gives a man a cheap outlook on life.
Besides, don't forget--if the worst comes to the worst, I can
always get a job on a newspaper."

She would not have let him see how uneasy this remark made her.
However, she could not permit it to pass without notice. Said
she a little nervously:

"But you've made up your mind to devote yourself to plays--to
stand or fall by that."

He remembered how he had thrilled her and himself with brave
talk about the necessity of concentrating, of selecting a goal
and moving relentlessly for it, letting nothing halt him or turn
him aside. For his years Rod Spenser was as wise in the
philosophy of success as Burlingham or Tom Brashear. But he had
done that brave and wise talking before he loved her as he now
did--before he realized how love can be in itself an achievement
and a possession so great that other ambitions dwarf beside it.
True, away back in his facile, fickle mind, behind the region
where self-excuse and somebody-else-always-to-blame reigned
supreme, a something--the something that had set the marks of
success so strongly upon his face--was whispering to him the
real reason for his now revolving a New York newspaper job. Real
reasons as distinguished from alleged reasons and imagined
reasons, from the reasons self-deception invents and vanity
gives out--real reasons are always interesting and worth noting.
What was Rod's? Not his love for her; nothing so superior, so
superhuman as that. No, it was weak and wobbly misgivings as to
his own ability to get on independently, the misgivings that
menace every man who has never worked for himself but has always
drawn pay--the misgivings that paralyze most men and keep them
wage or salary slaves all their lives. Rod was no better pleased
at this sly, unwelcome revelation of his real self to himself
than the next human being is in similar circumstances. The
whispering was hastily suppressed; love for her, desire that she
should be comfortable--those must be the real reasons. But he
must be careful lest she, the sensitive, should begin to brood
over a fear that she was already weakening him and would become
a drag upon him--the fear that, he knew, would take shape in his
own mind if things began to go badly. "You may be sure,
dearest," he said, "I'll do nothing that won't help me on." He
tapped his forehead with his finger. "This is a machine for
making plays. Everything that's put into it will be grist for it."

She was impressed but not convinced. He had made his point about
concentration too clear to her intelligence. She persisted:

"But you said if you took a place on a newspaper it would make
you fight less hard."

"I say a lot of things," he interrupted laughingly. "Don't be
frightened about me. What I'm most afraid of is that you'll
desert me. _That_ would be a real knock-out blow."

He said this smilingly; but she could not bear jokes on that one subject.

"What do you mean, Rod?"

"Now, don't look so funereal, Susie. I simply meant that I hate
to think of your going on the stage--or at anything else. I want
you to help _me_. Selfish, isn't it? But, dear heart, if I could
feel that the plays were _ours_, that we were both concentrated
on the one career--darling. To love each other, to work
together--not separately but together--don't you understand?"

Her expression showed that she understood, but was not at all in
sympathy. "I've got to earn my living, Rod," she objected. "I
shan't care anything about what I'll be doing. I'll do it simply
to keep from being a burden to you----"

"A burden, Susie! You! Why, you're my wings that enable me to
fly. It's selfish, but I want all of you. Don't you think, dear,
that if it were possible, it would be better for you to make us
a home and hold the fort while I go out to give battle to
managers--and bind up my wounds when I come back--and send me out
the next day well again? Don't you think we ought to concentrate?"

The picture appealed to her. All she wanted in life now was his
success. "But," she objected, "it's useless to talk of that
until we get on our feet--perfectly useless."

"It's true," he admitted with a sigh.

"And until we do, we must be economical."

"What a persistent lady it is," laughed he. "I wish I were like that."

In the evening's gathering dusk the train steamed into Jersey
City; and Spenser and Susan Lenox, with the adventurer's
mingling hope and dread, confidence and doubt, courage and fear,
followed the crowd down the long platform under the vast train
shed, went through the huge thronged waiting-room and aboard the
giant ferryboat which filled both with astonishment because of
its size and luxuriousness.

"I am a jay!" said she. "I can hardly keep my mouth from
dropping open."

"You haven't any the advantage of me," he assured her. "Are you
trembling all over?"

"Yes," she admitted. "And my heart's like lead. I suppose there
are thousands on thousands like us, from all over the
country--who come here every day--feeling as we do. "

"Let's go out on the front deck--where we can see it."

They went out on the upper front deck and, leaning against the
forward gates, with their traveling bags at their feet, they
stood dumb before the most astounding and most splendid scene in
the civilized world. It was not quite dark yet; the air was
almost July hot, as one of those prematurely warm days New York
so often has in March. The sky, a soft and delicate blue shading
into opal and crimson behind them, displayed a bright crescent
moon as it arched over the fairyland in the dusk before them.
Straight ahead, across the broad, swift, sparkling river--the
broadest water Susan had ever seen--rose the mighty, the
majestic city. It rose direct from the water. Endless stretches
of ethereal-looking structure, reaching higher and higher, in
masses like mountain ranges, in peaks, in towers and domes. And
millions of lights, like fairy lamps, like resplendent jewels,
gave the city a glory beyond that of the stars thronging the
heavens on a clear summer night.

They looked toward the north; on and on, to the far horizon's
edge stretched the broad river and the lovely city that seemed
the newborn offspring of the waves; on and on, the myriad
lights, in masses, in festoons, in great gleaming globes of fire
from towers rising higher than Susan's and Rod's native hills.
They looked to the south. There, too, rose city, mile after
mile, and then beyond it the expanse of the bay; and everywhere
the lights, the beautiful, soft, starlike lights, shedding a
radiance as of heaven itself over the whole scene. Majesty and
strength and beauty.

"I love it!" murmured the girl. "Already I love it."

"I never dreamed it was like this," said Roderick, in an awed tone.

"The City of the Stars," said she, in the caressing tone in
which a lover speaks the name of the beloved.

They moved closer together and clasped hands and gazed as if
they feared the whole thing--river and magic city and their own
selves--would fade away and vanish forever. Susan clutched Rod
in terror as she saw the vision suddenly begin to move, to
advance toward her, like apparitions in a dream before they
vanish. Then she exclaimed, "Why, we are moving!" The big
ferryboat, swift, steady as land, noiseless, had got under way.
Upon them from the direction of the distant and hidden sea blew
a cool, fresh breeze. Never before had either smelled that
perfume, strong and keen and clean, which comes straight from
the unbreathed air of the ocean to bathe New York, to put life
and hope and health into its people. Rod and Susan turned their
faces southward toward this breeze, drank in great draughts of
it. They saw a colossal statue, vivid as life in the dusk, in
the hand at the end of the high-flung arm a torch which sent a
blaze of light streaming out over land and water.

"That must be Liberty," said Roderick.

Susan slipped her arm through his. She was quivering with
excitement and joy. "Rod--Rod!" she murmured. "It's the isles of
freedom. Kiss me."

And he bent and kissed her, and his cheek felt the tears upon
hers. He reached for her hand, with an instinct to strengthen
her. But when he had it within his its firm and vital grasp sent
a thrill of strength through him.

A few minutes, and they paused at the exit from the ferry house.
They almost shrank back, so dazed and helpless did they feel
before the staggering billows of noise that swept savagely down
upon them--roar and crash, shriek and snort; the air was
shuddering with it, the ground quaking. The beauty had
vanished--the beauty that was not the city but a glamour to lure
them into the city's grasp; now that city stood revealed as a
monster about to seize and devour them.

"God!" He shouted in her ear. "Isn't this _frightful!_"

She was recovering more quickly than he. The faces she saw
reassured her. They were human faces; and while they were eager
and restless, as if the souls behind them sought that which
never could be found, they were sane and kind faces, too. Where
others of her own race lived, and lived without fear, she, too,
could hope to survive. And already she, who had loved this
mighty offspring of the sea and the sky at first glance, saw and
felt another magic--the magic of the peopled solitude. In this
vast, this endless solitude she and he would be free. They could
do as they pleased, live as they pleased, without thought of the
opinion of others. Here she could forget the bestial horrors of
marriage; here she would fear no scornful pointing at her
birthbrand of shame. She and Rod could be poor without shame;
they could make their fight in the grateful darkness of obscurity.

"Scared?" he asked.

"Not a bit," was her prompt answer. "I love it more than ever."

"Well, it frightens me a little. I feel helpless--lost in the
noise and the crowd. How can I do anything here!"

"Others have. Others do."

"Yes--yes! That's so. We must take hold!" And he selected a
cabman from the shouting swarm. "We want to go, with two trunks,
to the Hotel St. Denis," said he.

"All right, sir! Gimme the checks, please."

Spenser was about to hand them over when Susan said in an
undertone, "You haven't asked the price."

Spenser hastened to repair this important omission. "Ten
dollars," replied the cabman as if ten dollars were some such
trifle as ten cents.

Spenser laughed at the first experience of the famous New York
habit of talking in a faint careless way of large sums of
money--other people's money. "You did save us a swat," he said
to Susan, and beckoned another man. The upshot of a long and
arduous discussion, noisy and profane, was that they got the
carriage for six dollars--a price which the policeman who had
been drawn into the discussion vouched for as reasonable.
Spenser knew it was too high, knew the policeman would get a
dollar or so of the profit, but he was weary of the wrangle; and
he would not listen to Susan's suggestion that they have the
trunks sent by the express company and themselves go in a street
car for ten cents. At the hotel they got a large comfortable
room and a bath for four dollars a day. Spenser insisted it was
cheap; Susan showed her alarm--less than an hour in New York and
ten dollars gone, not to speak of she did not know how much
change. For Roderick had been scattering tips with what is for
some mysterious reason called "a princely hand," though princes
know too well the value of money and have too many extravagant
tastes ever to go far in sheer throwing away.

They had dinner in the restaurant of the hotel and set out to
explore the land they purposed to subdue and to possess. They
walked up Broadway to Fourteenth, missed their way in the dazzle
and glare of south Union Square, discovered the wandering
highway again after some searching. After the long, rather quiet
stretch between Union Square and Thirty-fourth Street they found
themselves at the very heart of the city's night life. They
gazed in wonder upon the elevated road with its trains
thundering by high above them. They crossed Greeley Square and
stood entranced before the spectacle--a street bright as day
with electric signs of every color, shape and size; sidewalks
jammed with people, most of them dressed with as much pretense
to fashion as the few best in Cincinnati; one theater after
another, and at Forty-second Street theaters in every direction.
Surely--surely--there would be small difficulty in placing his
play when there were so many theaters, all eager for plays.

They debated going to the theater, decided against it, as they
were tired from the journey and the excitement of crowding new
sensations. "I've never been to a real theater in my life," said
Susan. "I want to be fresh the first time I go."

"Yes," cried Rod. "That's right. Tomorrow night. That _will_ be
an experience!" And they read the illuminated signs, inspected
the show windows, and slowly strolled back toward the hotel. As
they were recrossing Union Square, Spenser said, "Have you
noticed how many street girls there are? We must have passed a
thousand. Isn't it frightful?"

"Yes," said Susan.

Rod made a gesture of disgust, and said with feeling, "How low
a woman must have sunk before she could take to that life!"

"Yes," said Susan.

"So low that there couldn't possibly be left any shred of
feeling or decency anywhere in her." Susan did not reply.

"It's not a question of morals, but of sensibility," pursued he.
"Some day I'm going to write a play or a story about it. A woman
with anything to her, who had to choose between that life and
death, wouldn't hesitate an instant. She couldn't. A
streetwalker!" And again he made that gesture of disgust.

"Before you write," said Susan, in a queer, quiet voice, "you'll
find out all about it. Maybe some of these girls--most of
them--all of them--are still human beings. It's not fair to
judge people unless you know. And it's so easy to say that
someone else ought to die rather than do this or that."

"You can't imagine yourself doing such a thing," urged he.

Susan hesitated, then--"Yes," she said.

Her tone irritated him. "Oh, nonsense! You don't know what
you're talking about."

"Yes," said Susan.

"Susie!" he exclaimed, looking reprovingly at her.

She met his eyes without flinching. "Yes," she said. "I have."

He stopped short and his expression set her bosom to heaving.
But her gaze was steady upon his. "Why did you tell me!" he
cried. "Oh, it isn't so--it can't be. You don't mean exactly that."

"Yes, I do," said she.

"Don't tell me! I don't want to know." And he strode on, she
keeping beside him.

"I can't let you believe me different from what I am," replied
she. "Not you. I supposed you guessed."

"Now I'll always think of it--whenever I look at you. . . . I
simply can't believe it. . . . You spoke of it as if you
weren't ashamed."

"I'm not ashamed," she said. "Not before you. There isn't
anything I've done that I wouldn't be willing to have you know.
I'd have told you, except that I didn't want to recall it. You
know that nobody can live without getting dirty. The thing is to
want to be clean--and to try to get clean afterward--isn't it?"

"Yes," he admitted, as if he had not been hearing. "I wish you
hadn't told me. I'll always see it and feel it when I look at you."

"I want you to," said she. "I couldn't love you as I do if I
hadn't gone through a great deal."

"But it must have left its stains upon you," said he. Again he
stopped short in the street, faced her at the curb, with the
crowd hurrying by and jostling them. "Tell me about it!" he
commanded.

She shook her head. "I couldn't." To have told would have been
like tearing open closed and healed wounds. Also it would have
seemed whining--and she had utter contempt for whining. "I'll
answer any question, but I can't just go on and tell."

"You deliberately went and did--that?"

"Yes."

"Haven't you any excuse, any defense?"

She might have told him about Burlingham dying and the need of
money to save him. She might have told him about Etta--her
health going--her mind made up to take to the streets, with no
one to look after her. She might have made it all a moving and
a true tale--of self-sacrifice for the two people who had done
most for her. But it was not in her simple honest nature to try
to shift blame. So all she said was:

"No, Rod."

"And you didn't want to kill yourself first?"

"No. I wanted to live. I was dirty--and I wanted to be clean. I
was hungry--and I wanted food. I was cold--that was the worst.
I was cold, and I wanted to get warm. And--I had been
married--but I couldn't tell even you about that--except--after
a woman's been through what I went through then, nothing in life
has any real terror or horror for her."

He looked at her long. "I don't understand," he finally said.
"Come on. Let's go back to the hotel."

She walked beside him, making no attempt to break his gloomy
silence. They went up to their room and she sat on the lounge by
the window. He lit a cigarette and half sat, half lay, upon the
bed. After a long time he said with a bitter laugh, "And I was
so sure you were a good woman!"

"I don't feel bad," she ventured timidly. "Am I?"

"Do you mean to tell me," he cried, sitting up, "that you don't
think anything of those things?"

"Life can be so hard and cruel, can make one do so many----"

"But don't you realize that what you've done is the very worst
thing a woman can do?"

"No," said she. "I don't. . . . I'm sorry you didn't understand.
I thought you did--not the details, but in a general sort of
way. I didn't mean to deceive you. That would have seemed to me
much worse than anything I did."

"I might have known! I might have known!" he cried--rather
theatrically, though sincerely withal--for Mr. Spenser was a
diligent worker with the tools of the play-making trade. "I
learned who you were as soon as I got home the night I left you
in Carrolton. They had been telephoning about you to the
village. So I knew about you."

"About my mother?" asked she. "Is that what you mean?"

"Oh, you need not look so ashamed," said he, graciously, pityingly.

"I am not ashamed," said she. But she did not tell him that her
look came from an awful fear that he was about to make her
ashamed of him.

"No, I suppose you aren't," he went on, incensed by this further
evidence of her lack of a good woman's instincts. "I really
ought not to blame you. You were born wrong--born with the moral
sense left out."

"Yes, I suppose so," said she, wearily.

"If only you had lied to me--told me the one lie!" cried he.
"Then you wouldn't have destroyed my illusion. You wouldn't have
killed my love."

She grew deathly white; that was all.

"I don't mean that I don't love you still," he hurried on. "But
not in the same way. That's killed forever."

"Are there different ways of loving?" she asked.
"How can I give you the love of respect and trust--now?"

"Don't you trust me--any more?"

"I couldn't. I simply couldn't. It was hard enough before on
account of your birth. But now----Trust a woman who had been a--
a--I can't speak the word. Trust you? You don't understand a man."

"No, I don't." She looked round drearily. Everything in ruins.
Alone again. Outcast. Nowhere to go but the streets--the life
that seemed the only one for such as she. "I don't understand
people at all. . . . Do you want me to go?"

She had risen as she asked this. He was beside her instantly.
"Go!" he cried. "Why I couldn't get along without you."

"Then you love me as I love you," Said she, putting her arms
round him. "And that's all I want. I don't want what you call
respect. I couldn't ever have hoped to get that, being born as
I was--could I? Anyhow, it doesn't seem to me to amount to much.
I can't help it, Rod--that's the way I feel. So just love me--do
with me whatever you will, so long as it makes you happy. And I
don't need to be trusted. I couldn't think of anybody but you."

He felt sure of her again, reascended to the peak of the moral
mountain. "You understand, we can never get married. We can
never have any children."

"I don't mind. I didn't expect that. We can _love_--can't we?"

He took her face between his hands. "What an exquisite face it
is," he said, "soft and smooth! And what clear, honest eyes!
Where is _it?_ Where _is_ it? It _must_ be there!"

"What, Rod?"

"The--the dirt."

She did not wince, but there came into her young face a deeper
pathos--and a wan, deprecating, pleading smile. She said:

"Maybe love has washed it away--if it was there. It never seemed
to touch me--any more than the dirt when I had to clean up my room."

"You mustn't talk that way. Why you are perfectly calm! You
don't cry or feel repentant. You don't seem to care."

"It's so--so past--and dead. I feel as if it were another
person. And it was, Rod!"

He shook his head, frowning. "Let's not talk about it," he said
harshly. "If only I could stop thinking about it!"

She effaced herself as far as she could, living in the same room
with him. She avoided the least show of the tenderness she felt,
of the longing to have her wounds soothed. She lay awake the
whole night, suffering, now and then timidly and softly
caressing him when she was sure that he slept. In the morning
she pretended to be asleep, let him call her twice before she
showed that she was awake. A furtive glance at him confirmed the
impression his voice had given. Behind her pale, unrevealing
face there was the agonized throb of an aching heart, but she
had the confidence of her honest, utter love; he would surely
soften, would surely forgive. As for herself--she had, through
loving and feeling that she was loved, almost lost the sense of
the unreality of past and present that made her feel quite
detached and apart from the life she was leading, from the
events in which she was taking part, from the persons most
intimately associated with her. Now that sense of isolation, of
the mere spectator or the traveler gazing from the windows of
the hurrying train--that sense returned. But she fought against
the feeling it gave her.

That evening they went to the theater--to see Modjeska in "Magda."

Susan had never been in a real theater. The only approach to a
playhouse in Sutherland was Masonic Hall. It had a sort of stage
at one end where from time to time wandering players gave poor
performances of poor plays or a minstrel show or a low
vaudeville. But none of the best people of Sutherland went--at
least, none of the women. The notion was strong in Sutherland
that the theater was of the Devil--not so strong as in the days
before they began to tolerate amateur theatricals, but still
vigorous enough to give Susan now, as she sat in the big,
brilliant auditorium, a pleasing sense that she, an outcast, was
at last comfortably at home. Usually the first sight of anything
one has dreamed about is pitifully disappointing. Neither nature
nor life can build so splendidly as a vivid fancy. But Susan, in
some sort prepared for the shortcomings of the stage, was not
disappointed. From rise to fall of curtain she was so
fascinated, so absolutely absorbed, that she quite forgot her
surroundings, even Rod. And between the acts she could not talk
for thinking. Rod, deceived by her silence, was chagrined. He
had been looking forward to a great happiness for himself in
seeing her happy, and much profit from the study of the
viewpoint of an absolutely fresh mind. It wasn't until they were
leaving the theater that he got an inkling of the true state of
affairs with her.

"Let's go to supper," said he.

"If you don't mind," replied she, "I'd rather go home. I'm very tired."

"You were sound asleep this morning. So you must have slept
well," said he sarcastically.

"It's the play," said she.

"_Why_ didn't you like it?" he asked, irritated.

She looked at him in wonder. "Like what? The play?" She drew a
long breath. "I feel as if it had almost killed me."

He understood when they were in their room and she could hardly
undress before falling into a sleep so relaxed, so profound,
that it made him a little uneasy. It seemed to him the
exhaustion of a child worn out with the excitement of a
spectacle. And her failure to go into ecstasies the next day led
him further into the same error. "Modjeska is very good as
_Magda_," said he, carelessly, as one talking without expecting
to be understood. "But they say there's an Italian
woman--Duse--who is the real thing."

Modjeska--Duse--Susan seemed indeed not to understand. "I hated
her father," she said. "He didn't deserve to have such a
wonderful daughter."

Spenser had begun to laugh with her first sentence. At the
second he frowned, said bitterly: "I might have known! You get
it all wrong. I suppose you sympathize with _Magda_?"

"I worshiped, her " said Susan, her voice low and tremulous with
the intensity of her feeling.

Roderick laughed bitterly. "Naturally," he said. "You can't
understand."

An obvious case, thought he. She was indeed one of those
instances of absolute lack of moral sense. Just as some people
have the misfortune to be born without arms or without legs, so
others are doomed to live bereft of a moral sense. A sweet
disposition, a beautiful body, but no soul; not a stained soul,
but no soul at all. And his whole mental attitude toward her
changed; or, rather, it was changed by the iron compulsion of
his prejudice. The only change in his physical attitude--that is,
in his treatment of her--was in the direction of bolder passion.
of complete casting aside of all the restraint a conventional
respecter of conventional womanhood feels toward a woman whom he
respects. So, naturally, Susan, eager to love and to be loved,
and easily confusing the not easily distinguished spiritual and
physical, was reassured. Once in a while a look or a phrase from
him gave her vague uneasiness; but on the whole she felt that,
in addition to clear conscience from straightforwardness, she
had a further reason for being glad Chance had forced upon her
the alternative of telling him or lying. She did not inquire
into the realities beneath the surface of their life--neither
into what he thought of her, nor into what she thought of
him--thought in the bottom of her heart. She continued to fight
against, to ignore, her feeling of aloneness, her feeling of
impending departure.

She was aided in this by her anxiety about their finances. In
his efforts to place his play he was spending what were for them
large sums of money--treating this man and that to dinners, to
suppers--inviting men to lunch with him at expensive Broadway
restaurants. She assumed that all this was necessary; he said
so, and he must know. He was equally open-handed when they were
alone, insisting on ordering the more expensive dishes, on
having suppers they really did not need and drink which she knew
she would be better off without--and, she suspected, he also. It
simply was not in him, she saw, to be careful about money. She
liked it, as a trait, for to her as to all the young and the
unthinking carelessness about money seems a sure, perhaps the
surest, sign of generosity--when in fact the two qualities are
in no way related. Character is not a collection of ignorant
impulses but a solidly woven fabric of deliberate purposes.
Carelessness about anything most often indicates a tendency to
carelessness about everything. She admired his openhanded way of
scattering; she wouldn't have admired it in herself, would have
thought it dishonest and selfish. But Rod was different. _He_ had
the "artistic temperament," while she was a commonplace nobody,
who ought to be--and was--grateful to him for allowing her to
stay on and for making such use of her as he saw fit. Still,
even as she admired, she saw danger, grave danger, a
disturbingly short distance ahead. He described to her the
difficulties he was having in getting to managers, in having his
play read, and the absurdity of the reasons given for turning it
down. He made light of all these; the next manager would see,
would give him a big advance, would put the play on--and then,
Easy Street!

But experience had already killed what little optimism there was
in her temperament--and there had not been much, because George
Warham was a successful man in his line, and successful men do
not create or permit optimistic atmosphere even in their houses.
Nor had she forgotten Burlingham's lectures on the subject with
illustrations from his own spoiled career; she understood it all
now--and everything else he had given her to store up in her
memory that retained everything. With that philippic against
optimism in mind, she felt what Spenser was rushing toward. She
made such inquiries about work for herself as her inexperience
and limited opportunities permitted. She asked, she begged him,
to let her try to get a place. He angrily ordered her to put any
such notion out of her head. After a time she nerved herself
again to speak. Then he frankly showed her why he was refusing.

"No," said he peremptorily, "I couldn't trust you in those
temptations. You must stay where I can guard you."

A woman who had deliberately taken to the streets--why, she
thought nothing of virtue; she would be having lovers with the
utmost indifference; and while she was not a liar yet--"at
least, I think not"--how long would that last? With virtue gone,
virtue the foundation of woman's character--the rest could no
more stand than a house set on sand.

"As long as you want me to love you, you've got to stay with
me," he declared. "If you persist, I'll know you're simply
looking for a chance to go back to your old ways."

And though she continued to think and cautiously to inquire
about work she said no more to him. She spent not a penny,
discouraged him from throwing money away--as much as she could
without irritating him--and waited for the cataclysm. Waited not
in gloom and tears but as normal healthy youth awaits any
adversity not definitely scheduled for an hour close at hand. It
would be far indeed from the truth to picture Susan as ever for
long a melancholy figure to the eye or even wholly melancholy
within. Her intelligence and her too sympathetic heart were
together a strong force for sadness in her life, as they cannot
but be in any life. In this world, to understand and to
sympathize is to be saddened. But there was in her a force
stronger than either or both. She had superb health. It made her
beautiful, strong body happy; and that physical happiness
brought her up quickly out of any depths--made her gay in spite
of herself, caused her to enjoy even when she felt that it was
"almost like hard-heartedness to be happy." She loved the sun
and in this city where the sun shone almost all the days,
sparkling gloriously upon the tiny salt particles filling the
air and making it delicious to breathe and upon the skin--in
this City of the Sun as she called it, she was gay even when she
was heavy-hearted.

Thus, she was no repellent, aggravating companion to Rod as she
awaited the cataclysm.

It came in the third week. He spent the entire day away from her,
toward midnight he returned, flushed with liquor. She had
gone to bed. "Get up and dress," said he with an irritability
toward her which she had no difficulty in seeing was really
directed at himself. "I'm hungry--and thirsty. We're going out
for some supper."

"Come kiss me first," said she, stretching out her arms. Several
times this device had shifted his purpose from spending money on
the needless and expensive suppers.

He laughed. "Not a kiss. We're going to have one final blow-out.
I start to work tomorrow. I've taken a place on the _Herald_--on
space, guaranty of twenty-five a week, good chance to average
fifty or sixty."

He said this hurriedly, carelessly, gayly--guiltily. She showed
then and there what a surpassing wise young woman she was, for
she did not exclaim or remind him of his high resolve to do or
die as a playwright. "I'll be ready in a minute," was all she said.

She dressed swiftly, he lounging on the sofa and watching her.
He loved to watch her dress, she did it so gracefully, and the
motions brought out latent charms of her supple figure. "You're
not so sure-fingered tonight as usual," said he. "I never saw
you make so many blunders--and you've got one stocking on wrong
side out."

She smiled into the glass at him. "The skirt'll cover that. I
guess I was sleepy."

"Never saw your eyes more wide-awake. What're you thinking about?"

"About supper," declared she. "I'm hungry. I didn't feel like
eating alone."

"I can't be here always," said he crossly--and she knew he was
suspecting what she really must be thinking.

"I wasn't complaining," replied she sweetly. "You know I
understand about business."

"Yes, I know," said he, with his air of generosity that always
made her feel grateful. "I always feel perfectly free about you."

"I should say!" laughed she. "You know I don't care what happens
so long as you succeed." Since their talk in Broadway that first
evening in New York she had instinctively never said "we."

When they were at the table at Rector's and he had taken a few
more drinks, he became voluble and plausible on the subject of
the trifling importance of his setback as a playwright. It was
the worst possible time of year; the managers were stocked up;
his play would have to be rewritten to suit some particular
star; a place on a newspaper, especially such an influential
paper as the _Herald_, would be of use to him in interesting
managers. She listened and looked convinced, and strove to
convince herself that she believed. But there was no gray in her
eyes, only the deepest hue of violets.

Next day they took a suite of two rooms and a bath in a
pretentious old house in West Forty-fourth Street near Long Acre
Square. She insisted that she preferred another much sunnier and
quieter suite with no bath but only a stationary washstand; it
was to be had for ten dollars a week. But he laughed at her as
too economical in her ideas, and decided for the eighteen-dollar
rooms. Also he went with her to buy clothes, made her spend
nearly a hundred dollars where she would have spent less than
twenty-five. "I prefer to make most of my things," declared she.
"And I've all the time in the world." He would not have it. In
her leisure time she must read and amuse herself and keep
herself up to the mark, especially physically. "I'm proud of
your looks," said he. "They belong to me, don't they? Well, take
care of my property, Miss."

She looked at him vaguely--a look of distance, of parting, of
pain. Then she flung herself into his arms with a hysterical
cry--and shut her eyes tight against the beckoning figure
calling her away. "No! No!" she murmured. "I belong here--_here!_"

"What are you saying?" he asked.

"Nothing--nothing," she replied.

                          CHAPTER XXV

AT the hotel they had been Mr. and Mrs. Spenser. When they
moved, he tried to devise some way round this; but it was
necessary that they have his address at the office, and Mrs.
Pershall with the glistening old-fashioned false teeth who kept
the furnished-room house was not one in whose withered bosom it
would be wise to raise a suspicion as to respectability. Only in
a strenuously respectable house would he live; in the other
sort, what might not untrustworthy Susan be up to? So Mr. and
Mrs. Spenser they remained, and the truth was suspected by only
a few of their acquaintances, was known by two or three of his
intimates whom he told in those bursts of confidence to which
voluble, careless men are given--and for which they in resolute
self-excuse unjustly blame strong drink.

One of his favorite remarks to her--sometimes made laughingly,
again ironically, again angrily, again insultingly, was in this strain:

"Your face is demure enough. But you look too damned attractive
about those beautiful feet of yours to be respectable at
heart--and trustable."

That matter of her untrustworthiness had become a fixed idea
with him. The more he concentrated upon her physical loveliness,
the more he revolved the dangers, the possibilities of
unfaithfulness; for a physical infatuation is always jealous.
His work on the _Herald_ made close guarding out of the question.
The best he could do was to pop in unexpectedly upon her from
time to time, to rummage through her belongings, to check up her
statements as to her goings and comings by questioning the
servants and, most important of all, each day to put her through
searching and skillfully planned cross-examination. She had to
tell him everything she did--every little thing--and he
calculated the time, to make sure she had not found half an hour
or so in which to deceive him. If she had sewed, he must look at
the sewing; if she had read, he must know how many pages and
must hear a summary of what those pages contained. As she would
not and could not deceive him in any matter, however small, she
was compelled to give over a plan quietly to look for work and
to fit herself for some occupation that would pay a living
wage--if there were such for a beginning woman worker.

At first he was covert in this detective work, being ashamed of
his own suspicions. But as he drank, as he associated again with
the same sort of people who had wasted his time in Cincinnati,
he rapidly became franker and more inquisitorial. And she
dreaded to see the look she knew would come into his eyes, the
cruel tightening of his mouth, if in her confusion and eagerness
she should happen not instantly to satisfy the doubt behind each
question. He tormented her; he tormented himself. She suffered
from humiliation; but she suffered more because she saw how his
suspicions were torturing him. And in her humility and
helplessness and inexperience, she felt no sense of right to
resist, no impulse to resist.

And she forced herself to look on his spasms of jealousy as the
occasional storms which occur even in the best climates. She
reminded herself that she was secure of his love, secure in his
love; and in her sad mood she reproached herself for not being
content when at bottom everything was all right. After what she
had been through, to be sad because the man she loved loved her
too well! It was absurd, ungrateful.

He pried into every nook and corner of her being with that
ingenious and tireless persistence human beings reserve for
searches for what they do not wish to find. At last he contrived
to find, or to imagine he had found, something that justified
his labors and vindicated his disbelief in her.

They were walking in Fifth Avenue one afternoon, at the hour
when there is the greatest press of equipages whose expensively
and showily dressed occupants are industriously engaged in the
occupation of imagining they are doing something when in fact
they are doing nothing. What a world! What a grotesque confusing
of motion and progress! What fantastic delusions that one is
busy when one is merely occupied! They were between Forty-sixth
Street and Forty-seventh, on the west side, when a small
victoria drew up at the curb and a woman descended and crossed
the sidewalk before them to look at the display in a milliner's
window. Susan gave her the swift, seeing glance which one woman
always gives another--the glance of competitors at each other's
offerings. Instead of glancing away, Susan stopped short and
gazed. Forgetting Rod, she herself went up to the millinery
display that she might have a fuller view of the woman who had
fascinated her.

"What's the matter?" cried Spenser. "Come on. You don't want any
of those hats."

But Susan insisted that she must see, made him linger until the
woman returned to her carriage and drove away. She said to Rod:

"Did you see her?"

"Yes. Rather pretty--nothing to scream about."

"But her _style!_" cried Susan.

"Oh, she was nicely dressed--in a quiet way. You'll see
thousands a lot more exciting after you've been about in this
town a while."

"I've seen scores of beautifully dressed women here--and in
Cincinnati, too," replied Susan. "But that woman--she was
_perfect_. And that's a thing I've never seen before."
"I'm glad you have such quiet tastes--quiet and inexpensive."

"Inexpensive!" exclaimed Susan. "I don't dare think how much
that woman's clothes cost. You only glanced at her, Rod, you
didn't _look_. If you had, you'd have seen. Everything she wore
was just right." Susan's eyes were brilliant. "Oh, it was
wonderful! The colors--the fit--the style--the making--every big
and little thing. She was a work of art, Rod! That's the first
woman I've seen in my life that I through and through envied."

Rod's look was interested now. "You like that sort of thing a
lot?" he inquired with affected carelessness.

"Every woman does," replied she, unsuspicious. "But I
care--well, not for merely fine clothes. But for the--the kind
that show what sort of person is in them." She sighed. "I wonder
if I'll ever learn--and have money enough to carry out. It'll
take so much--so much!" She laughed. "I've got terribly
extravagant ideas. But don't be alarmed--I keep them chained up."

He was eying her unpleasantly. Suddenly she became confused. He
thought it was because she was seeing and understanding his look
and was frightened at his having caught her at last. In fact, it
was because it all at once struck her that what she had
innocently and carelessly said sounded like a hint or a reproach
to him. He sneered:

"So you're crazy about finery--eh?"

"Oh, Rod!" she cried. "You know I didn't mean it that way. I
long for and dream about a whole lot of beautiful things, but
nothing else in the world's in the same class with--with what
we've got."

"You needn't try to excuse yourself," said he in a tone that
silenced her.

She wished she had not seen the woman who had thus put a cloud
over their afternoon's happiness. But long after she had
forgotten his queerness about what she said, she continued to
remember that "perfect" woman--to see every detail of her
exquisite toilet, so rare in a world where expensive-looking
finery is regarded as the chief factor in the art of dress. How
much she would have to learn before she could hope to dress like
that!--learn not merely about dress but about the whole artistic
side of life. For that woman had happened to cross Susan's
vision at just the right moment--in development and in mood--to
reveal to her clearly a world into which she had never
penetrated--a world of which she had vaguely dreamed as she read
novels of life in the lands beyond the seas, the life of palaces
and pictures and statuary, of opera and theater, of equipages
and servants and food and clothing of rare quality. She had
rather thought such a life did not exist outside of novels and
dreams. What she had seen of New York--the profuse, the gigantic
but also the undiscriminating--had tended to strengthen the
suspicion. But this woman proved her mistaken.

Our great forward strides are made unconsciously, are the
results of apparently trivial, often unnoted impulses. Susan,
like all our race, had always had vague secret dreams of
ambition--so vague thus far that she never thought of them as
impelling purposes in her life. Her first long forward stride
toward changing these dreams from the vague to the definite was
when Rod, before her on the horse on the way to Brooksburg,
talked over his shoulder to her of the stage and made her feel
that it was the life for her, the only life open to her where a
woman could hope to be judged as human being instead of as mere
instrument of sex. Her second long forward movement toward
sharply defined ambition dated from the sight of the woman of
the milliner's window--the woman who epitomized to Susan the
whole art side of life that always gives its highest expression
in some personal achievement--the perfect toilet, the perfect
painting or sculpture, the perfect novel or play.

But Rod saw in her enthusiasm only evidence of a concealed
longing for the money to indulge extravagant whims. With his
narrowing interest in women--narrowed now almost to sex--his
contempt for them as to their minds and their hearts was so far
advancing that he hardly took the trouble to veil it with
remnants of courtesy. If Susan had clearly understood--even if
she had let herself understand what her increasing knowledge
might have enabled her to understand--she would have hated him
in spite of the hold gratitude and habit had given him upon her
loyal nature--and despite the fact that she had, as far as she
could see, no alternative to living with him but the tenements
or the streets.

One day in midsummer she chanced to go into the Hotel Astor to
buy a magazine. As she had not been there before she made a
wrong turning and was forced to cross one of the restaurants. In
a far corner, half hidden by a group of palms, she saw Rod at a
small table with a strikingly pretty woman whose expression and
dress and manner most energetically proclaimed the actress. The
woman was leaning toward him, was touching his hand and looking
into his eyes with that show of enthusiasm which raises doubts
of sincerity in an experienced man and sets him to keeping an
eye or a hand--or both--upon his money. Real emotion, even a
professional expert at display of emotion, is rarely so adept at
exhibiting itself.

It may have been jealousy that guided her to this swift judgment
upon the character of the emotion correctly and charmingly
expressing itself. If so, jealousy was for once a trustworthy
guide. She turned swiftly and escaped unseen. The idea of
trapping him, of confronting him, never occurred to her. She
felt ashamed and self-reproachful that she had seen. Instead of
the anger that fires a vain woman, whether she cares about a man
or not, there came a profound humiliation. She had in some way
fallen short; she had not given him all he needed; it must be
that she hadn't it to give, since she had given him all she had.
He must not know--he must not! For if he knew he might dislike
her, might leave her--and she dared not think what life would be
without him, her only source of companionship and affection, her
only means of support. She was puzzled that her discovery, not
of his treachery--he had so broken her spirit with his
suspicions and his insulting questions that she did not regard
herself as of the rank and dignity that has the right to exact
fidelity--but of his no longer caring enough to be content with
her alone, had not stunned her with amazement. She did not
realize how completely the instinct that he was estranged from
her had prepared her for the thing that always accompanies
estrangement. Between the perfect accord, that is, the never
realized ideal for a man and a woman living together, and the
intolerable discord that means complete repulse there is a vast
range of states of feeling imperceptibly shading into each
other. Most couples constantly move along this range, now toward
the one extreme, now toward the other. As human kings are not
given to self-analysis, and usually wander into grotesque error
whenever they attempt it, no couple knows precisely where it is
upon the range, until something crucial happens to compel them
to know. Susan and Rod had begun as all couples begin--with an
imaginary ideal accord based upon their ignorance of each other
and their misunderstanding of what qualities they thought they
understood in each other. The delusion of accord vanished that
first evening in New York. What remained? What came in the
place? They knew no more about that than does the next couple.
They were simply "living along." A crisis, drawing them close
together or flinging them forever apart or forcing them to live
together, he frankly as keeper and she frankly as kept, might
come any day, any hour. Again it might never come.

After a few weeks the matter that had been out of her mind
accidentally and indirectly came to the surface in a chance
remark. She said:

"Sometimes I half believe a man could be untrue to a woman, even
though he loved her."

She did not appreciate the bearings of her remark until it was
spoken. With a sensation of terror lest the dreaded crisis might
be about to burst, she felt his quick, nervous glance. She
breathed freely again when she felt his reassurance and relief
as she successfully withstood.

"Certainly," he said with elaborate carelessness. "Men are a
rotten, promiscuous lot. That's why it's necessary for a woman
to be good and straight."

All this time his cross-examination had grown in severity.
Evidently he was fearing that she might be having a recurrence
of the moral disease which was fatal in womankind, though only
mild indiscretion in a man, if not positively a virtue, an
evidence of possessing a normal masculine nature. Her mind began
curiously--sadly--to revolve the occasional presents--of money,
of books, of things to wear--which he gave, always quite
unexpectedly. At first unconsciously, but soon consciously, she
began to associate these gifts, given always in an embarrassed,
shamefaced way, with certain small but significant indications
of his having strayed. And it was not long before she
understood; she was receiving his expiations for his
indiscretions. Like an honest man and a loyal--masculinely
loyal--lover he was squaring accounts. She never read the books
she owed to these twinges; it was thus that she got her aversion
to Thackeray--one of his "expiations" was a set of Thackeray.
The things to wear she contrived never to use. The conscience
money she either spent upon him or put back into his pocket a
little at a time, sure that he, the most careless of men about
money, would never detect her.

His work forced him to keep irregular hours; thus she could
pretend to herself that his absences were certainly because of
office duty. Still, whenever he was gone overnight, she became
unhappy--not the crying kind of unhappiness; to that she was
little given--but the kind that lies awake and aches and with
morbid vivid fancy paints the scenes suspicion suggests, and
stares at them not in anger but in despair. She was always
urging herself to content herself with what she was getting. She
recalled and lived again the things she had forgotten while
Roderick was wholly hers--the penalties of the birth brand of
shame--her wedding night--the miseries of the last period of her
wanderings with Burlingham--her tenement days--the dirt, the
nakedness, the brutal degradation, the vermin, the savage cold.
And the instant he returned, no matter how low-spirited she had
been, she was at once gay, often deliriously gay--until soon his
awakened suspicion as to what she had been up to in his absence
quieted her. There was little forcing or pretense in this
gayety; it bubbled and sparkled from the strong swift current of
her healthy passionate young life which, suspended in the icy
clutch of fear when he was away from her, flowed as freely as the
brooks in spring as soon as she realized that she still had him.

Did she really love him? She believed she did. Was she right?
Love is of many degrees--and kinds. And strange and confused
beyond untangling is the mixture of motives and ideas in the
mind of any human being as to any other being with whom his or
her relations are many sided.

Anyone who had not been roughly seized by destiny and forced to
fight desperately weaponless might have found it difficult to
understand how this intelligent, high-spirited girl could be so
reasonable--coarsely practical, many people would have said. A
brave soul--truly brave with the unconscious courage that lives
heroically without any taint of heroics--such a soul learns to
accept the facts of life, to make the best of things, to be
grateful for whatever sunshine may be and not to shriek and
gesticulate at storm. Suffering had given this sapling of a girl
the strong fiber that enables a tree to push majestically up
toward the open sky. Because she did not cry out was no sign
that she was not hurt; and because she did not wither and die of
her wounds was only proof of her strength of soul. The weak wail
and the weak succumb; the strong persist--and a world of wailers
and weaklings calls them hard, insensible, coarse.

Spenser was fond of exhibiting to his men friends--to some of
them--this treasure to which he always returned the more
enamoured for his vagary and its opportunity of comparison.
Women he would not permit. In general, he held that all women,
the respectable no less than the other kind, put mischief in
each other's heads and egged each other on to carry out the
mischief already there in embryo. In particular, he would have
felt that he was committing a gross breach of the proprieties,
not to say the decencies, had he introduced a woman of Susan's
origin, history and present status to the wives and sisters of
his friends; and, for reasons which it was not necessary even to
pretend to conceal from her, he forbade her having anything to
do with the kinds of woman who would not have minded, had they
known all about her. Thus, her only acquaintances, her only
associates, were certain carefully selected men. He asked to
dinner or to the theater or to supper at Jack's or Rector's only
such men as he could trust. And trustworthy meant physically
unattractive. Having small and dwindling belief in the mentality
of women, and no belief whatever in mentality as a force in the
relations of the sexes, he was satisfied to have about her any
man, however clever, provided he was absolutely devoid of
physical charm.

The friend who came oftenest was Drumley, an editorial writer
who had been his chum at college and had got him the place on
the _Herald_. Drumley he would have trusted alone with her on a
desert island; for several reasons, all of his personal
convenience, it pleased him that Susan liked Drumley and was
glad of his company, no matter how often he came or how long he
stayed. Drumley was an emaciated Kentucky giant with grotesquely
sloping shoulders which not all the ingenious padding of his
tailor could appreciably mitigate. His spare legs were bowed in
the calves. His skin looked rough and tough, like sandpaper and
emery board. The thought of touching his face gave one the same
sensation as a too deeply cut nail. His neck was thin and long,
and he wore a low collar--through that interesting passion of the
vain for seeing a defect in themselves as a charm and calling
attention to it. The lower part of his sallow face suggested
weakness--the weakness so often seen in the faces of
professional men, and explaining why they chose passive instead of
active careers. His forehead was really fine, but the development
of the rest of the cranium above the protuberant little ears was
not altogether satisfying to a claim of mental powers.

Drumley was a good sort--not so much through positive virtue as
through the timidity which too often accounts for goodness, that
is, for the meek conformity which passes as goodness. He was an
insatiable reader, had incredible stores of knowledge; and as he
had a large vocabulary and a ready speech he could dole out of
those reservoirs an agreeable treacle of commonplace philosophy
or comment--thus he had an ideal equipment for editorial
writing. He was absolutely without physical magnetism. The most
he could ever expect from any woman was respect; and that woman
would have had to be foolish enough not to realize that there is
as abysmal a difference between knowledge and mentality as there
is between reputation and character. Susan liked him because he
knew so much. She had developed still further her innate passion
for educating herself. She now wanted to know all about
everything. He told her what to read, set her in the way to
discovering and acquiring the art of reading--an art he was
himself capable of acquiring only in its rudiments--an art the
existence of which is entirely unsuspected by most persons who
regard themselves and are regarded as readers. He knew the
histories and biographies that are most amusing and least
shallow and mendacious. He instructed her in the great
playwrights and novelists and poets, and gave--as his own--the
reasons for their greatness assigned by the world's foremost
critical writers. He showed her what scientific books to
read--those that do not bore and do not hide the simple
fascinating facts about the universe under pretentious,
college-professor phraseology.

He was a pedant, but his pedantry was disguised, therefore
mitigated by his having associated with men of the world instead
of with the pale and pompous capons of the student's closet. His
favorite topic was beauty and ugliness--and his abhorrence for
anyone who was not good to look at. As he talked this subject,
his hearers were nervous and embarrassed. He was a drastic cure
for physical vanity. If this man could so far deceive himself
that he thought himself handsome, who in all the world could be
sure he or she was not the victim of the same incredible
delusion? It was this hallucination of physical beauty that
caused Rod to regard him as the safest of the safe. For it made
him pitiful and ridiculous.

At first he came only with Spenser. Afterward, Spenser used to
send him to dine with Susan and to spend the evenings with her
when he himself had to be--or wished to be elsewhere. When she
was with Drumley he knew she was not "up to any of her old
tricks." Drumley fell in love with her; but, as in his
experience the female sex was coldly chaste, he never developed
even the slight hope necessary to start in a man's mind the idea
of treachery to his friend about a woman. Whenever Drumley heard
that a woman other than the brazenly out and out disreputables
was "loose" or was inclined that way, he indignantly denied it
as a libel upon the empedestaled sex. If proofs beyond dispute
were furnished, he raved against the man with all the venom of
the unsuccessful hating the successful for their success. He had
been sought of women, of course, for he had a comfortable and
secure position and money put by. But the serious women who had
set snares for him for the sake of a home had not attracted him;
as for the better looking and livelier women who had come
a-courting with alimony in view, they had unwisely chosen the
method of approach that caused him to set them down as nothing
but professional loose characters. Thus his high ideal of
feminine beauty and his lofty notion of his own deserts, on the
one hand, and his reverence for womanly propriety, on the other
hand, had kept his charms and his income unshared.

Toward the end of Spenser's first year on the _Herald_--it was
early summer--he fell into a melancholy so profound and so
prolonged that Susan became alarmed. She was used to his having
those fits of the blues that are a part of the nervous, morbidly
sensitive nature and in the unhealthfulness of an irregular and
dissipated life recur at brief intervals. He spent more and more
time with her, became as ardent as in their first days together,
with an added desperation of passionate clinging that touched
her to the depths. She had early learned to ignore his moods, to
avoid sympathy which aggravates, and to meet his blues with a
vigorous counterirritant of liveliness. After watching the
course of this acute attack for more than a month, she decided
that at the first opportunity she would try to find out from
Drumley what the cause was. Perhaps she could cure him if she
were not working in the dark.

One June evening Drumley came to take her to dinner at the
Casino in Central Park. She hesitated. She still liked Drumley's
mind; but latterly he had fallen into the way of gazing
furtively, with a repulsive tremulousness of his loose eyelids,
at her form and at her ankles--especially at her
ankles--especially at her ankles. This furtive debauch gave her
a shivery sense of intrusion. She distinctly liked the candid,
even the not too coarse, glances of the usual man. But not this
shy peeping. However, as there were books she particularly
wished to talk about with him, she accepted.

It was an excursion of which she was fond. They strolled along
Seventh Avenue to the Park, entered and followed the lovely
walk, quiet and green and odorous, to the Mall. They sauntered
in the fading light up the broad Mall, with its roof of boughs
of majestic trees, with its pale blue vistas of well-kept lawns.
At the steps leading to the Casino they paused to delight in the
profusely blooming wistaria and to gaze away northward into and
over what seemed an endless forest with towers and cupolas of
castle and fortress and cathedral rising serene and graceful
here and there above the sea of green. There was the sound of
tinkling fountains, the musical chink-chink of harness chains of
elegant equipages; on the Mall hundreds of children were playing
furiously, to enjoy to the uttermost the last few moments before
being snatched away to bed--and the birds were in the same
hysterical state as they got ready for their evening song. The
air was saturated with the fresh odors of spring and early
summer flowers. Susan, walking beside the homely Drumley, was a
charming and stylish figure of girlish womanhood. The year and
three months in New York had wrought the same transformations in
her that are so noticeable whenever an intelligent and observant
woman with taste for the luxuries is dipped in the magic of city
life. She had grown, was now perhaps a shade above the medium
height for women, looked even taller because of the slenderness
of her arms, of her neck, of the lines of her figure. There was
a deeper melancholy in her violet-gray eyes. Experience had
increased the allure of her wide, beautifully curved mouth.

They took a table under the trees, with beds of blooming flowers
on either hand. Drumley ordered the sort of dinner she liked,
and a bottle of champagne and a bottle of fine burgundy to make
his favorite drink--champagne and burgundy, half and half. He
was running to poetry that evening--Keats and Swinburne.
Finally, after some hesitation, he produced a poem by Dowson--"I
ran across it today. It's the only thing of his worth while, I
believe--and it's so fine that Swinburne must have been sore
when he read it because he hadn't thought to write it himself.
Its moral tone is not high, but it's so beautiful, Mrs. Susan,
that I'll venture to show it to you. It comes nearer to
expressing what men mean by the man sort of constancy than
anything I ever read. Listen to this:

"I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,
But when the feast is finished, and the lamps expire,
Then falls thy shadow, Cynara!--the night is thine;
And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire;
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion."

Susan took the paper, read the four stanzas several times,
handed it back to him without a word. "Don't you think it fine?"
asked he, a little uneasily--he was always uneasy with a woman
when the conversation touched the relations of the sexes--uneasy
lest he might say or might have said something to send a shiver
through her delicate modesty.

"Fine," Susan echoed absently. "And true. . . . I suppose it is
the best a woman can expect--to be the one he returns to.
And--isn't that enough?"

"You are very different from any woman I ever met," said
Drumley. "Very different from what you were last
fall--wonderfully different. But you were different then, too."

"I'd have been a strange sort of person if it weren't so. I've
led a different life. I've learned--because I've had to learn."

"You've been through a great deal--suffered a great deal for one
of your age?"

Susan shrugged her shoulders slightly. She had her impulses to
confide, but she had yet to meet the person who seriously
tempted her to yield to them. Not even Rod; no, least of all Rod.

"You are--happy?"

"Happy--and more. I'm content."

The reply was the truth, as she saw the truth. Perhaps it was
also the absolute truth; for when a woman has the best she has
ever actually possessed, and when she knows there is nowhere
else on earth for her, she is likely to be content. Their
destiny of subordination has made philosophers of women.

Drumley seemed to be debating how to disclose something he had
in mind. But after several glances at the sweet, delicate face
of the girl, he gave it over. In the subdued light from the
shaded candles on their table, she looked more child-like than
he had ever seen. Perhaps her big pale-blue hat and graceful
pale-blue summer dress had something to do with it, also. "How
old are you?" he asked abruptly.

"Nearly nineteen."

"I feel like saying, `So much!'--and also `So little!' How long
have you been married?"

"Why all these questions?" demanded she, smiling.

He colored with embarrassment. "I didn't mean to be
impertinent," said he.

"It isn't impertinence--is it?--to ask a woman how long she's
been married."

But she did not go on to tell him; instead, she pretended to
have her attention distracted by a very old man and a very young
girl behaving in most lover-like fashion, the girl outdoing the
man in enthusiastic determination to convince. She was elegantly
and badly dressed in new clothes--and she seemed as new to that
kind of clothes as those particular clothes were new to her.
After dinner they walked down through the Park by the way they
had come; it did not look like the same scene now, with the
moonlight upon it, with soft shadows everywhere and in every
shadow a pair of lovers. They had nearly reached the entrance
when Drumley said: "Let's sit on this bench here. I want to have
a serious talk with you."

Susan seated herself and waited. He lit a cigar with the
deliberation of one who is striving to gain time. The bench
happened to be one of those that are divided by iron arms into
individual seats. He sat with a compartment between them. The
moonbeams struck across his profile as he turned it toward her;
they shone full upon her face. He looked, hastily glanced away.
With a gruffness as if the evening mist had got into his throat
he said:

"Let's take another bench."

"Why?" objected she. "I like this beautiful light."

He rose. "Please let me have my way." And he led her to a bench
across which a tree threw a deep shadow; as they sat there,
neither could see the other's face except in dimmest outline.
After a brief silence he began:

"You love Rod--don't you?"

She laughed happily.

"Above everything on earth?"

"Or in heaven."

"You'd do anything to have him succeed?"

"No one could prevent his succeeding. He's got it in him. It's
bound to come out."

"So I'd have said--until a year ago--that is, about a year ago."

As her face turned quickly toward him, he turned profile to her.
"What do you mean?" said she, quickly, almost imperiously.

"Yes--I mean _you_," replied he.

"You mean you think I'm hindering him?"

When Drumley's voice finally came, it was funereally solemn.
"You are dragging him down. You are killing his ambition."

"You don't understand," she protested with painful expression.
"If you did, you wouldn't say that."

"You mean because he is not true to you?"

"Isn't he?" said she, loyally trying to pretend surprise. "If
that's so, you've no right to tell me--you, his friend. If it
isn't, you----"

"In either case I'd be beneath contempt--unless I knew that you
knew already. Oh, I've known a long time that you knew--ever
since the night you looked away when he absentmindedly pulled a
woman's veil and gloves out of his pocket. I've watched you
since then, and I know."

"You are a very dear friend, Mr. Drumley," said she. "But you
must not talk of him to me."

"I must," he replied. And he hastened to make the self-fooled
hypocrite's familiar move to the safety of duty's skirts. "It
would be a crime to keep silent."

She rose. "I can't listen. It may be your duty to speak. It's my
duty to refuse to hear."

"He is overwhelmed with debt. He is about to lose his position.
It is all because he is degraded--because he feels he is
entangled in an intrigue with a woman he is ashamed to love--a
woman he has struggled in vain to put out of his heart."

Susan, suddenly weak, had seated herself again. From his first
words she had been prey to an internal struggle--her heart
fighting against understanding things about her relations with
Rod, about his feeling toward her, which she had long been
contriving to hide from herself. When Drumley began she knew
that the end of self-deception was at hand--if she let him
speak. But the instant he had spoken, the struggle ended. If he
had tried to stop she would have compelled him to go on.

"That woman is you," he continued in the same solemn measured
way. "Rod will not marry you. He cannot leave you. And you are
dragging him down. You are young. You don't know that passionate
love is a man's worst enemy. It satisfies his ambition--why
struggle when one already has attained the climax of desire? It
saps his strength, takes from him the energy without which
achievement is impossible. Passion dies poisoned of its own
sweets. But passionate love kills--at least, it kills the man. If
you did not love him, I'd not be talking to you now. But you do
love him. So I say, you are killing him. . . . Don't think he
has told me "

"I know he didn't," she interrupted curtly. "He does not whine."

She hadn't a doubt of the truth of her loyal defense. And
Drumley could not have raised a doubt, even if she had been
seeing the expression of his face. His long practice of the
modern editorial art of clearness and brevity and compact
statement had enabled him to put into those few sentences more
than another might have been unable to express in hours of
explanation and appeal. And the ideas were not new to her. Rod
had often talked them in a general way and she had thought much
about them. Until now she had never seen how they applied to Rod
and herself. But she was seeing and feeling it now so acutely
that if she had tried to speak or to move she could not have
done so.

After a long pause, Drumley said: "Do you comprehend what I mean?"

She was silent--so it was certain that she comprehended.
"But you don't believe?. . . He began to borrow money almost
immediately on his arrival here last summer. He has been
borrowing ever since--from everybody and anybody. He owes now,
as nearly as I can find out, upwards of three thousand dollars."

Susan made a slight but sharp movement.

"You don't believe me?"

"Yes. Go on."

"He has it in him, I'm confident, to write plays--strong plays.
Does he ever write except ephemeral space stuff for the paper?"

"No."

"And he never will so long as he has you to go home to. He lives
beyond his means because he will have you in comfortable
surroundings and dressed to stimulate his passion. If he would
marry you, it might be a little better--though still he would
never amount to anything as long as his love lasted--the kind of
love you inspire. But he will never marry you. I learned that
from what I know of his ideas and from what I've observed as to
your relations--not from anything he ever said about you."

If Susan had been of the suspicious temperament, or if she had
been a few years older, the manner of this second protest might
have set her to thinking how unlike Drumley, the inexpert in
matters of love and passion, it was to analyze thus and to form
such judgments. And thence she might have gone on to consider
that Drumley's speeches sounded strangely like paraphrases of
Spenser's eloquent outbursts when he "got going." But she had
not a suspicion. Besides, her whole being was concentrated upon
the idea Drumley was trying to put into words. She asked:

"Why are you telling me?"

"Because I love him," replied Drumley with feeling. "We're about
the same age, but he's been like my son ever since we struck up
a friendship in the first term of Freshman year."

"Is that your only reason?"

"On my honor." And so firmly did he believe it, he bore her
scrutiny as she peered into his face through the dimness.

She drew back. "Yes," she said in a low voice, half to herself.
"Yes, I believe it is." There was silence for a long time, then
she asked quietly:

"What do you think I ought to do?"

"Leave him--if you love him," replied Drumley.

"What else can you do?. . . Stay on and complete his ruin?"

"And if I go--what?"

"Oh, you can do any one of many things. You can----"

"I mean--what about him?"

"He will be like a crazy man for a while. He'll make that a
fresh excuse for keeping on as he's going now. Then he'll brace
up, and I'll be watching over him, and I'll put him to work in
the right direction. He can't be saved, he can't even be kept
afloat as long as you are with him, or within reach. With you
gone out of his life--his strength will return, his self-respect
can be roused. I've seen the same thing in other cases again and
again. I could tell you any number of stories of----"

"He does not care for me?"

"In _one_ way, a great deal. But you're like drink, like a drug
to him. It is strange that a woman such as you, devoted,
single-hearted, utterly loving, should be an influence for bad.
But it's true of wives also. The best wives are often the worst.
The philosophers are right. A man needs tranquillity at home."

"I understand," said she. "I understand--perfectly. " And her
voice was unemotional, as always when she was so deeply moved
that she dared not release anything lest all should be released.

She was like a seated statue. The moon had moved so that it
shone upon her face. He was astonished by its placid calm. He
had expected her to rave and weep, to protest and plead--before
denouncing him and bidding him mind his own business. Instead,
she was making it clear that after all she did not care about
Roderick; probabLy she was wondering what would become of her,
now that her love was ruined. Well, wasn't it natural? Wasn't it
altogether to her credit--wasn't it additional proof that she was
a fine pure woman? How could she have continued deeply to care
for a man scandalously untrue, and drunk much of the time?
Certainly, it was in no way her fault that Rod made her the
object and the victim of the only kind of so-called love of
which he was capable. No doubt one reason he was untrue to her
was that she was too pure for his debauched fancy. Thus reasoned
Drumley with that mingling of truth and error characteristic of
those who speculate about matters of which they have small and
unfixed experience.

"About yourself," he proceeded. "I have a choice of professions
for you--one with a company on the road--on the southern
circuit--with good prospects of advancement. I know, from what
I have seen of you, and from talks we have had, that you would
do well on the stage. But the life might offend your
sensibilities. I should hesitate to recommend it to a delicate,
fine-fibered woman like you. The other position is a clerkship
in a business office in Philadelphia--with an increase as soon
as you learn stenography and typewriting. It is respectable. It
is sheltered. It doesn't offer anything brilliant. But except
the stage and literature, nothing brilliant offers for a woman.
Literature is out of the question, I think--certainly for the
present. The stage isn't really a place for a woman of lady-like
instincts. So I should recommend the office position."

She remained silent.

"While my main purpose in talking to you," he continued, "was to
try to save him, I can honestly say that it was hardly less my
intention to save you. But for that, I'd not have had the
courage to speak. He is on the way down. He's dragging you with
him. What future have you with him? You would go on down and
down, as low as he should sink and lower. You've completely
merged yourself in him--which might do very well if you were his
wife and a good influence in his life or a mere negation like
most wives. But in the circumstances it means ruin to you. Don't
you see that?"

"What did you say?"

"I was talking about you--your future your----"

"Oh, I shall do well enough." She rose. "I must be going."

Her short, indifferent dismissal of what was his real object in
speaking--though he did not permit himself to know it--cut him
to the quick. He felt a sickening and to him inexplicable sense
of defeat and disgrace. Because he must talk to distract his
mind from himself, he began afresh by saying:

"You'll think it over?"

"I am thinking it over. . . . I wonder that----"

With the fingers of one hand she smoothed her glove on the
fingers of the other--"I wonder that I didn't think of it long
ago. I ought to have thought of it. I ought to have seen."

"I can't tell you how I hate to have been the----"

"Please don't say any more," she requested in a tone that made
it impossible for a man so timid as he to disobey.

Neither spoke until they were in Fifty-ninth Street; then he,
unable to stand the strain of a silent walk of fifteen blocks,
suggested that they take the car down. She assented. In the car
the stronger light enabled him to see that she was pale in a way
quite different from her usual clear, healthy pallor, that
there was an unfamiliar look about her mouth and her eyes--a
look of strain, of repression, of resolve. These signs and the
contrast of her mute motionlessness with her usual vivacity of
speech and expression and gesture made him uneasy.

"I'd advise," said he, "that you reflect on it all carefully and
consult with me before you do anything--if you think you ought
to do anything."

She made no reply. At the door of the house he had to reach for
her hand, and her answer to his good night was a vague absent
echo of the word. "I've only done what I saw was my duty," said
he, appealingly.

"Yes, I suppose so. I must go in."

"And you'll talk with me before you----"

The door had closed behind her; she had not known he was speaking.

When Spenser came, about two hours later, and turned on the
light in their bedroom, she was in the bed, apparently asleep.
He stood staring with theatric self-consciousness at himself in
the glass for several minutes, then sat down before the bureau
and pulled out the third drawer--where he kept collars, ties,
handkerchiefs, gloves and a pistol concealed under the
handkerchiefs. With the awful solemnity of the youth who takes
himself--and the theater--seriously he lifted the pistol, eyed
it critically, turning it this way and that as if interested in
the reflections of light from the bright cylinder and barrel at
different angles. He laid it noiselessly back, covered it over
with the handkerchiefs, sat with his fingers resting on the edge
of the drawer. Presently he moved uneasily, as a man--on the
stage or in its amusing imitation called civilized life among
the self-conscious classes--moves when he feels that someone is
behind him in a "crucial moment."

He slowly turned round. She had shifted her position so that her
face was now toward him. But her eyes were closed and her face
was tranquil. Still, he hoped she had seen the little episode of
the pistol, which he thought fine and impressive. With his arm
on the back of the chair and supporting that resolute-looking
chin of his, he stared at her face from under his thick
eyebrows, so thick that although they were almost as fair as his
hair they seemed dark. After a while her eyelids fluttered and
lifted to disclose eyes that startled him, so intense, so
sleepless were they.

"Kiss me," she said, in her usual sweet, tender way--a little
shyness, much of passion's sparkle and allure. "Kiss me."

"I've often thought," said he, "what would I do if I should go
smash, reach the end of my string? Would I kill you before
taking myself off? Or would that be cowardly?"

She had not a doubt that he meant this melodramatic twaddle. It
did not seem twaddle or melodramatic to her--or, for that
matter, to him. She clasped him more closely. "What's the
matter, dear?" she asked, her head on his breast.

"Oh, I've had a row at the _Herald_, and have quit. But I'll get
another place tomorrow."

"Of course. I wish you'd fix up that play the way Drumley suggested."

"Maybe I shall. We'll see."

"Anything else wrong?"

"Only the same old trouble. I love you too much. Too damn much,"
he added in a tone not intended for her ears. "Weak fool--that's
what I am. Weak fool. I've got _you_, anyhow. Haven't I?"

"Yes," she said. "I'd do anything for you--anything."

"As long as I keep my eyes on you," said he, half mockingly.
"I'm weak, but you're weaker. Aren't you?"

"I guess so. I don't know." And she drew a long breath, nestled
into his arms, and upon his breast, with her perfumed hair
drowsing his senses.

He soon slept; when he awoke, toward noon, he did not disturb
her. He shaved and bathed and dressed, and was about to go out
when she called him. "Oh, I thought you were asleep," said he.
"I can't wait for you to get breakfast. I must get a move on."

"Still blue?"

"No, indeed." But his face was not convincing. "So long, pet."

"Aren't you going to kiss me good-by?"

He laughed tenderly, yet in bitter self-mockery too. "And waste
an hour or so? Not much. What a siren you are!"

She put her hand over her face quickly.

"Now, perhaps I can risk one kiss." He bent over her; his lips
touched her hair. She stretched out her hand, laid it against
his cheek. "Dearest," she murmured.

"I must go."

"Just a minute. No, don't look at me. Turn your face so that I
can see your profile--so!" She had turned his head with a hand
that gently caressed as it pushed. "I like that view best. Yes,
you are strong and brave. You will succeed! No--I'll not keep
you a minute." She kissed his hand, rested her head for an
instant on his lap as he sat on the edge of the bed, suddenly
flung herself to the far side of the bed, with her face toward
the wall.

"Go to sleep again, lazy!" cried he. "I'll try to be home about
dinner-time. See that you behave today! Good lord, how hard it
is to leave you! Having you makes nothing else seem worth while.
Good-by!"

And he was off. She started to a sitting posture, listened to
the faint sound of his descending footsteps. She darted to the
window, leaned out, watched him until he rounded the corner into
Broadway. Then she dropped down with elbows on the window sill
and hands pressing her cheeks; she stared unseeingly at the
opposite house, at a gilt cage with a canary hopping and
chirping within. And once more she thought all the thoughts that
had filled her mind in the sleepless hours of that night and
morning. Her eyes shifted in color from pure gray to pure
violet--back and forth, as emotion or thought dominated her
mind. She made herself coffee in the French machine, heated the
milk she brought every day from the dairy, drank her _cafe au
lait_ slowly, reading the newspaper advertisements for "help
wanted--female"--a habit she had formed when she first came to
New York and had never altogether dropped. When she finished
her coffee she took the scissors and cut out several of the
demands for help.

She bathed and dressed. She moved through the routine of
life--precisely as we all do, whatever may be in our minds and
hearts. She went out, crossed Long Acre and entered the shop of
a dealer in women's cast-off clothes. She reappeared in the
street presently with a fat, sloppy looking woman in black. She
took her to the rooms, offered for sale her entire wardrobe
except the dress she had on and one other, the simply trimmed
sailor upon her head, the ties on her feet and one pair of boots
and a few small articles. After long haggling the woman made a
final price--ninety-five dollars for things, most of them almost
new, which had cost upwards of seven hundred. Susan accepted the
offer; she knew she could do no better. The woman departed,
returned with a porter and several huge sweets of wrapping
paper. The two made three bundles of the purchases; the money
was paid over; they and Susan's wardrobe departed.

Next, Susan packed in the traveling bag she had brought from
Cincinnati the between seasons dress of brown serge she had
withheld, and some such collection of bare necessities as she
had taken with her when she left George Warham's. Into the bag
she put the pistol from under Spenser's handkerchiefs in the
third bureau drawer. When all was ready, she sent for the maid
to straighten the rooms. While the maid was at work, she wrote
this note:

DEAREST--Mr. Drumley will tell you why I have gone. You will
find some money under your handkerchiefs in the bureau. When you
are on your feet again, I may come--if you want me. It won't be
any use for you to look for me. I ought to have gone before, but
I was selfish and blind. Good-by, dear love--I wasn't so bad as
you always suspected. I was true to you, and for the sake of
what you have been to me and done for me I couldn't be so
ungrateful as not to go. Don't worry about me. I shall get on.
And so will you. It's best for us both. Good-by, dear heart--I
was true to you. Good-by.

She sealed this note, addressed it, fastened it over the mantel
in the sitting-room where they always put notes for each other.
And after she had looked in each drawer and in the closet at all
his clothing, and had kissed the pillow on which his head had
lain, she took her bag and went. She had left for him the
ninety-five dollars and also eleven dollars of the money she had
in her purse. She took with her two five-dollar bills and a
dollar and forty cents in change.

The violet waned in her eyes, and in its stead came the gray of
thought and action.

           ********THE END OF VOLUME I*******

                SUSAN LENOX: HER RISE AND FALL

                              by
                     David Graham Phillips

                           Volume II

                        WITH A PORTRAIT
                         OF THE AUTHOR

                    D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
                    NEW YORK        LONDON
                             1917

                     1917, BY
                    D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
                             ----
  1915,1916, BY THE INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE COMPANY

            Printed in the United States of America

                              I

SUSAN'S impulse was toward the stage. It had become a
definite ambition with her, the stronger because Spenser's
jealousy and suspicion had forced her to keep it a secret, to
pretend to herself that she had no thought but going on
indefinitely as his obedient and devoted mistress. The
hardiest and best growths are the growths inward--where they
have sun and air from without. She had been at the theater
several times every week, and had studied the performances at
a point of view very different from that of the audience. It
was there to be amused; she was there to learn. Spenser and
such of his friends as he would let meet her talked plays and
acting most of the time. He had forbidden her to have women
friends. "Men don't demoralize women; women demoralize each
other," was one of his axioms. But such women as she had a
bowing acquaintance with were all on the stage--in comic
operas or musical farces. She was much alone; that meant many
hours every day which could not but be spent by a mind like
hers in reading and in thinking. Only those who have observed
the difference aloneness makes in mental development, where
there is a good mind, can appreciate how rapidly, how broadly,
Susan expanded. She read plays more than any other kind of
literature. She did not read them casually but was always
thinking how they would act. She was soon making in
imagination stage scenes out of dramatic chapters in novels as
she read. More and more clearly the characters of play and
novel took shape and substance before the eyes of her fancy.
But the stage was clearly out of the question.

While the idea of a stage career had been dominant, she had
thought in other directions, also. Every Sunday, indeed almost
every day, she found in the newspapers articles on the subject
of work for women.

"Why do you waste time on that stuff?" said Drumley, when he
discovered her taste for it.

"Oh, a woman never can tell what may happen," replied she.

"She'll never learn anything from those fool articles,"
answered he. "You ought to hear the people who get them up
laughing about them. I see now why they are printed. It's good
for circulation, catches the women--even women like you."
However, she persisted in reading. But never did she find an
article that contained a really practical suggestion--that is,
one applying to the case of a woman who had to live on what
she made at the start, who was without experience and without
a family to help her. All around her had been women who were
making their way; but few indeed of them--even of those
regarded as successful--were getting along without outside aid
of some kind. So when she read or thought or inquired about
work for women, she was sometimes amused and oftener made
unhappy by the truth as to the conditions, that when a common
worker rises it is almost always by the helping hand of a man,
and rarely indeed a generous hand--a painful and shameful
truth which a society resolved at any cost to think well of
itself fiercely conceals from itself and hypocritically lies about.

She felt now that there was hope in only one direction--hope
of occupation that would enable her to live in physical, moral
and mental decency. She must find some employment where she
could as decently as might be realize upon her physical
assets. The stage would be best--but the stage was impossible,
at least for the time. Later on she would try for it; there
was in her mind not a doubt of that, for unsuspected of any
who knew her there lay, beneath her sweet and gentle exterior,
beneath her appearance of having been created especially for
love and laughter and sympathy, tenacity of purpose and daring
of ambition that were--rarely--hinted at the surface in her
moments of abstraction. However, just now the stage was
impossible. Spenser would find her immediately. She must go
into another part of town, must work at something that touched
his life at no point.

She had often been told that her figure would be one of her
chief assets as a player. And ready-made clothes fitted her
with very slight alterations--showing that she had a model
figure. The advertisements she had cut out were for cloak
models. Within an hour after she left Forty-fourth Street, she
found at Jeffries and Jonas, in Broadway a few doors below
Houston, a vacancy that had not yet been filled--though as a
rule all the help needed was got from the throng of applicants
waiting when the store opened.

"Come up to my office," said Jeffries, who happened to be near
the door as she entered. "We'll see how you shape up. We want
something extra--something dainty and catchy."

He was a short thick man, with flat feet, a flat face and an
almost bald head. In his flat nostrils, in the hollows of his
great forward bent ears and on the lobes were bunches of
coarse, stiff gray hairs. His eyebrows bristled; his small,
sly brown eyes twinkled with good nature and with sensuality.
His skin had the pallor that suggests kidney trouble. His
words issued from his thick mouth as if he were tasting each
beforehand--and liked the flavor. He led Susan into his private
office, closed the door, took a tape measure from his desk.
"Now, my dear," said he, eyeing her form gluttonously, "we'll
size you up--eh? You're exactly the build I like."

And under the pretense of taking her measurements, he fumbled
and felt, pinched and stroked every part of her person,
laughing and chuckling the while. "My, but you are sweet! And
so firm! What flesh! Solid--solid! Mighty healthy! You are a
good girl--eh?"

"I am a married woman."

"But you've got no ring."

"I've never worn a ring."

"Well--well! I believe that is one of the new wrinkles, but I
don't approve. I'm an old-fashioned family man. Let me see
again. Now, don't mind a poor old man like me, my dear. I've
got a wife--the best woman in the world, and I've never been
untrue to her. A look over the fence occasionally--but not an
inch out of the pasture. Don't stiffen yourself like that. I
can't judge, when you do. Not too much hips--neither sides nor
back. Fine! Fine! And the thigh slender--yes--quite lovely, my
dear. Thick thighs spoil the hang of garments. Yes--yes--a
splendid figure. I'll bet the bosom is a corker--fine skin and
nice ladylike size. You can have the place."

"What does it pay?" she asked.

"Ten dollars, to start with. Splendid wages. __I__ started on
two fifty. But I forgot--you don't know the business?"

"No--nothing about it," was her innocent, honest answer.

"Ah--well, then--nine dollars--eh?"

Susan hesitated.

"You can make quite a neat little bunch on the outside--_you_
can. We cater only to the best trade, and the buyers who come
to us are big easy spenders. But I'm supposed to know nothing
about that. You'll find out from the other girls."  He
chuckled. "Oh, it's a nice soft life except for a few weeks
along at this part of the year--and again in winter. Well--ten
dollars, then."

Susan accepted. It was more than she had expected to get; it
was less than she could hope to live on in New York in
anything approaching the manner a person of any refinement or
tastes or customs of comfort regards as merely decent. She
must descend again to the tenements, must resume the fight
against that physical degradation which sooner or later
imposes--upon those _descending_ to it--a degradation of mind
and heart deeper, more saturating, more putrefying than any
that ever originated from within. Not so long as her figure
lasted was she the worse off for not knowing a trade. Jeffries
was telling the truth; she would be getting splendid wages,
not merely for a beginner but for any woman of the working
class. Except in rare occasional instances wages and salaries
for women were kept down below the standard of decency by
woman's peculiar position--by such conditions as that most
women took up work as a temporary makeshift or to piece out a
family's earnings, and that almost any woman could
supplement--and so many did supplement--their earnings at
labor with as large or larger earnings in the stealthy
shameful way. Where was there a trade that would bring a girl
ten dollars a week at the start? Even if she were a
semi-professional, a stenographer and typewriter, it would
take expertness and long service to lift her up to such wages.
Thanks to her figure--to its chancing to please old Jeffries'
taste--she was better off than all but a few working women,
than all but a few workingmen. She was of the labor aristocracy;
and if she had been one of a family of  workers she would
have been counted an enviable favorite of fortune. Unfortunately,
she was alone unfortunately for herself, not at all from the
standpoint of the tenement class she was now joining. Among them
she would be a person who could afford the luxuries of life as
life reveals itself to the tenements.