Susan Lenox, Rise/Fall by David Graham Phillips

Susan soon discovered that she had miscalculated her earning
power. She had been deceived by her swiftness in the first
days, before the monotony of her task had begun to wear her
down. Her first week's earnings were only four dollars and
thirty cents. This in her freshness, and in the busiest season
when wages were at the highest point.

In the room next hers--the same, perhaps a little
dingier--lived a man. Like herself he had no trade--that is,
none protected by a powerful union and by the still more
powerful--in fact, the only powerful shield--requirements of
health and strength and a certain grade of intelligence that
together act rigidly to exclude most men and so to keep wages
from dropping to the neighborhood of the line of pauperism. He
was the most industrious and, in his small way, the most
resourceful of men. He was insurance agent, toilet soap agent,
piano tuner, giver of piano lessons, seller of pianos and of
music on commission. He worked fourteen and sixteen hours a
day. He made nominally about twelve to fifteen a week.
Actually--because of the poverty of his customers and his too
sympathetic nature he made five to six a week--the most any
working person could hope for unless in one of the few favored
trades. Barely enough to keep body and soul together. And why
should capital that needs so much for fine houses and wines and
servants and automobiles and culture and charity and the other
luxuries--why should capital pay more when so many were
competing for the privilege of being allowed to work?

She gave up her room at Mrs. Tucker's--after she had spent
several evenings walking the streets and observing and thinking
about the miseries of the fast women of the only class she
could hope to enter. "A woman," she decided, "can't even earn
a decent living that way unless she has the money to make the
right sort of a start. `To him that hath shall be given; from
him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he
hath.' Gideon was my chance and I threw it away."

Still, she did not regret. Of all the horrors the most
repellent seemed to her to be dependence upon some one man who
could take it away at his whim.

She disregarded the advice of the other girls and made the
rounds of the religious and charitable homes for working girls.
She believed she could endure perhaps better than could girls
with more false pride, with more awe of snobbish
conventionalities--at least she could try to endure--the
superciliousness, the patronizing airs, the petty restraints
and oppressions, the nauseating smugness, the constant prying
and peeping, the hypocritical lectures, the heavy doses of smug
morality. She felt that she could bear with almost any
annoyances and humiliations to be in clean surroundings and to
get food that was at least not so rotten that the eye could see
it and the nose smell it. But she found all the homes full,
with long waiting lists, filled for the most part, so the
working girls said, with professional objects of charity. Thus
she had no opportunity to judge for herself whether there was
any truth in the prejudice of the girls against these few and
feeble attempts to mitigate the miseries of a vast and ever
vaster multitude of girls. Adding together all the
accommodations offered by all the homes of every description,
there was a total that might possibly have provided for the
homeless girls of a dozen factories or sweatshops--and the
number of homeless girls was more than a quarter of a million,
was increasing at the rate of more than a hundred a day.

Charity is so trifling a force that it can, and should be,
disregarded. It serves no _good_ useful service. It enables
comfortable people to delude themselves that all that can be
done is being done to mitigate the misfortunes which the poor
bring upon themselves. It obscures the truth that modern
civilization has been perverted into a huge manufacturing of
decrepitude and disease, of poverty and prostitution. The
reason we talk so much and listen so eagerly when our
magnificent benevolences are the subject is that we do not wish
to be disturbed--and that we dearly love the tickling sensation
in our vanity of generosity.

Susan was compelled to the common lot--the lot that will be the
common lot as long as there are people to be made, by taking
advantage of human necessities, to force men and women and
children to degrade themselves into machines as wage-slaves.
At two dollars a week, double what her income justified--she
rented a room in a tenement flat in Bleecker street. It was a
closet of a room whose thin, dirt-adorned walls were no
protection against sound or vermin, not giving even privacy
from prying eyes. She might have done a little better had she
been willing to share room and bed with one or more girls, but
not enough better to compensate for what that would have meant.

The young Jew with the nose so impossible that it elevated his
countenance from commonplace ugliness to weird distinction had
taken a friendly fancy to her. He was Julius Bam, nephew of
the proprietor. In her third week he offered her the
forewoman's place. "You've got a few brains in your head,"
said he. "Miss Tuohy's a boob. Take the job and you'll push
up. We'll start you at five per."

Susan thanked him but declined. "What's the use of my taking
a job I couldn't keep more than a day or two?" explained she.
"I haven't it in me to boss people."

"Then you've got to get it, or you're done for," said he.
"Nobody ever gets anywhere until he's making others work for him."

It was the advice she had got from Matson, the paper box
manufacturer in Cincinnati. It was the lesson she found in all
prosperity on every hand. Make others work for you--and the
harder you made them work the more prosperous you
were--provided, of course, you kept all or nearly all the
profits of their harder toil. Obvious common sense. But how
could she goad these unfortunates, force their clumsy fingers
to move faster, make their long and weary day longer and
wearier--with nothing for them as the result but duller brain,
clumsier fingers, more wretched bodies? She realized why those
above lost all patience with them, treated them with contempt.
Only as one of them could any intelligent, energetic human
being have any sympathy for them, stupid and incompetent from
birth, made ever more and more stupid and incapable by the
degrading lives they led. She could scarcely conceal her
repulsion for their dirty bodies, their stained and rotting
clothing saturated with stale sweat, their coarse flesh reeking
coarse food smells. She could not listen to their
conversation, so vulgar, so inane. Yet she felt herself--for
the time--one of them, and her heart bled for them. And while
she knew that only their dullness of wit and ignorance kept
them from climbing up and stamping and trampling full as
savagely and cruelly as did those on top, still the fact
remained that they were not stamping and trampling.

As she was turning in some work, Miss Tuohy said abruptly:
"You don't belong here. You ought to go back."

Susan started, and her heart beat wildly. She was going to
lose her job!

The forelady saw, and instantly understood. "I don't mean
that," she said. "You can stay as long as you like--as long as
your health lasts. But isn't there somebody
somewhere--_anybody_--you can go to and ask them to help you out
of this?"

"No--there's no one," said she.

"That can't be true," insisted the forelady. "Everybody has
somebody--or can get somebody--that is, anyone who looks like
you. I wouldn't suggest such a thing to a fool. But _you_
could keep your head. There isn't any other way, and you might
as well make up your mind to it."

To confide is one of the all but universal longings--perhaps
needs--of human nature. Susan's honest, sympathetic eyes, her
look and her habit of reticence, were always attracting
confidences from such unexpected sources as hard, forbidding
Miss Tuohy. Susan was not much surprised when Miss Tuohy went
on to say:

"I was spoiled when I was still a kid--by getting to know well
a man who was above my class. I had tastes that way, and he
appealed to them. After him I couldn't marry the sort of man
that wanted me. Then my looks went--like a flash--it often
happens that way with us Irish girls. But I can get on. I
know how to deal with these people--and _you_ never could learn.
You'd treat 'em like ladies and they'd treat you as easy fruit.
Yes, I get along all right, and I'm happy--away from here."

Susan's sympathetic glance of inquiry gave the necessary
encouragement. "It's a baby," Miss Tuohy explained--and Susan
knew it was for the baby's sake that this good heart had
hardened itself to the dirty work of forelady. Her eyes
shifted as she said, "A child of my sister's--dead in Ireland.
How I do love that baby----"

They were interrupted and it so happened that the confidence
was never resumed and finished. But Miss Tuohy had made her
point with Susan--had set her to thinking less indefinitely.
"I _must_ take hold!" Susan kept saying to herself. The
phrase was always echoing in her brain. But how?--_how?_ And
to that question she could find no answer.

Every morning she bought a one-cent paper whose big circulation
was in large part due to its want ads--its daily section of
closely printed columns of advertisements of help wanted and
situations wanted. Susan read the columns diligently. At
first they acted upon her like an intoxicant, filling her not
merely with hope but with confident belief that soon she would
be in a situation where the pay was good and the work
agreeable, or at least not disagreeable. But after a few weeks
she ceased from reading.

Why? Because she answered the advertisements, scores of them,
more than a hundred, before she saw through the trick and gave
up. She found that throughout New York all the attractive or
even tolerable places were filled by girls helped by their
families or in other ways, girls working at less than living
wages because they did not have to rely upon their wages for
their support. And those help wanted advertisements were
simply appeals for more girls of that sort--for cheaper girls;
or they were inserted by employment agencies, masquerading in
the newspaper as employers and lying in wait to swindle working
girls by getting a fee in exchange for a false promise of good
work at high wages; or they were the nets flung out by crafty
employers who speeded and starved their slaves, and wished to
recruit fresh relays to replace those that had quit in
exhaustion or in despair.

"Why do you always read the want ads?" she said to Lany
Ricardo, who spent all her spare time at those advertisements
in two papers she bought and one she borrowed every day. "Did
you ever get anything good, or hear of anybody that did?"

"Oh, my, no," replied Lany with a laugh. "I read for the same
reason that all the rest do. It's a kind of dope. You read
and then you dream about the places--how grand they are and how
well off you'll be. But nobody'd be fool enough to answer one
of 'em unless she was out of a job and had to get another and
didn't care how rotten it was. No, it's just dope--like buyin'
policy numbers or lottery tickets. You know you won't git a
prize, but you have a lot of fun dreaming about it."

As Susan walked up and down at the lunch hour, she talked with
workers, both men and women, in all sorts of employment. Some
were doing a little better than she; others--the most--were
worse off chiefly because her education, her developed
intelligence, enabled her to ward off savage blows--such as
illness from rotten food--against which their ignorance made
them defenseless. Whenever she heard a story of someone's
getting on, how grotesquely different it was from the stories
she used to get out of the Sunday school library and dream
over! These almost actualities of getting on had nothing in
them about honesty and virtue. According to them it was always
some sort of meanness or trickery; and the particular meanness
or tricks were, in these practical schools of success in
session at each lunch hour, related in detail as lessons in how
to get on. If the success under discussion was a woman's, it
was always how her boss or employer had "got stuck on her" and
had given her an easier job with good pay so that she could
wear clothes more agreeable to his eyes and to his touch. Now
and then it was a wonderful dazzling success--some girl had got
her rich employer so "dead crazy" about her that he had taken
her away from work altogether and had set her up in a flat with
a servant and a "swell trap"; there was even talk of marriage.

Was it true? Were the Sunday school books through and through
lies--ridiculous, misleading lies, wicked lies--wicked because
they hid the shameful truth that ought to be proclaimed from
the housetops? Susan was not sure. Perhaps envy twisted
somewhat these tales of rare occasional successes told by the
workers to each other. But certain it was that, wherever she
had the opportunity to see for herself, success came only by
hardness of heart, by tricks and cheats. Certain it was also
that the general belief among the workers was that success
could be got in those ways only--and this belief made the
falsehood, if it was a falsehood, or the partial truth, if it
was a twisted truth, full as poisonous as if it had been true
throughout. Also, if the thing were not true, how came it that
everyone in practical life believed it to be so--how came it
that everyone who talked in praise of honesty and virtue
looked, as he talked, as if he were canting and half expected
to be laughed at?

All about her as badly off as she, or worse off. Yet none so
unhappy as she--not even the worse off. In fact, the worse off
as the better off were not so deeply wretched. Because they
had never in all their lives known the decencies of life clean
lodgings, clean clothing, food fit to eat, leisure and the
means of enjoying leisure. And Susan had known all these
things. When she realized why her companions in misery, so
feeble in self-restraint, were able to endure patiently and for
the most part even cheerfully, how careful she was never to say
or to suggest anything that might put ideas of what life might
be, of what it was for the comfortable few, into the minds of
these girls who never had known and could only be made wretched
by knowing! How fortunate for them, she thought, that they had
gone to schools where they met only their own kind! How
fortunate that the devouring monster of industry had snatched
them away from school before their minds had been awakened to
the realities of life! How fortunate that their imaginations
were too dull and too heavy to be touched by the sights of
luxury they saw in the streets or by what they read in the
newspapers and in the cheap novels! To them, as she soon
realized, their world seemed the only world, and the world that
lived in comfort seemed a vague unreality, as must seem
whatever does not come into our own experience.

One lunch hour an apostle of discontent preaching some kind of
politics or other held forth on the corner above the shop.
Susan paused to listen. She had heard only a few words when
she was incensed to the depths of her heart against him. He
ought to be stopped by the police, this scoundrel trying to
make these people unhappy by awakening them to the misery and
degradation of their lot! He looked like an honest, earnest
man. No doubt he fancied that he was in some way doing good.
These people who were always trying to do the poor good--they
ought all to be suppressed! If someone could tell them how to
cease to be poor, that would indeed be good. But such a thing
would be impossible. In Sutherland, where the best off hadn't
so painfully much more than the worst off, and where everybody
but the idle and the drunken, and even they most of the time,
had enough to eat, and a decent place to sleep, and some kind
of Sunday clothes--in Sutherland the poverty was less than in
Cincinnati, infinitely less than in this vast and incredibly
rich New York where in certain districts wealth, enormous
wealth, was piled up and up. So evidently the presence of
riches did not help poverty but seemed to increase it. No, the
disease was miserable, thought Susan. For most of the human
race, disease and bad food and vile beds in dingy holes and
days of fierce, poorly paid toil--that was the law of this hell
of a world. And to escape from that hideous tyranny, you must
be hard, you must trample, you must rob, you must cease to be human.

The apostle of discontent insisted that the law could be
changed, that the tyranny could be abolished. She listened,
but he did not convince her. He sounded vague and dreamy--as
fantastically false in his new way as she had found the Sunday
school books to be. She passed on.

She continued to pay out a cent each day for the newspaper.
She no longer bothered with the want ads. Pipe dreaming did
not attract her; she was too fiercely bent upon escape, actual
escape, to waste time in dreaming of ways of escape that she
never could realize. She read the paper because, if she could
not live in the world but was battered down in its dark and
foul and crowded cellar, she at least wished to know what was
going on up in the light and air. She found every day news of
great doings, of wonderful rises, of rich rewards for industry
and thrift, of abounding prosperity and of opportunity fairly
forcing itself into acceptance. But all this applied only to
the few so strangely and so luckily chosen, while the mass was
rejected. For that mass, from earliest childhood until death,
there was only toil in squalor--squalid food, squalid clothing,
squalid shelter. And when she read one day--in an obscure
paragraph in her newspaper--that the income of the average
American family was less than twelve dollars a week--less than
two dollars and a half a week for each individual--she realized
that what she was seeing and living was not New York and
Cincinnati, but was the common lot, country wide, no doubt
world wide.

"_Must_ take hold!" her mind cried incessantly to her shrinking
heart. "Somehow--anyhow--take hold!--must--must--_must!_"

Those tenement houses! Those tenement streets! Everywhere
wandering through the crowds the lonely old women--holding up
to the girls the mirror of time and saying: "Look at my
misery! Look at my disease-blasted body. Look at my toil-bent
form and toil-wrecked hands. Look at my masses of wrinkles, at
my rags, at my leaky and rotten shoes. Think of my
aloneness--not a friend--feared and cast off by my relatives
because they are afraid they will have to give me food and
lodgings. Look at me--think of my life--and know that I am
_you_ as you will be a few years from now whether you work as a
slave to the machine or as a slave to the passions of one or of
many men. I am _you_. Not one in a hundred thousand escape my
fate except by death."

"Somehow--anyhow--I must take hold," cried Susan to her
swooning heart.

When her capital had dwindled to three dollars Mrs. Tucker
appeared. Her face was so beaming bright that Susan, despite
her being clad in garments on which a pawnshop would advance
nothing, fancied she had come with good news.

"Now that I'm rid of that there house," said she, "I'll begin
to perk up. I ain't got nothing left to worry me. I'm ready
for whatever blessings the dear Master'll provide. My pastor
tells me I'm the finest example of Christian fortitude he ever
Saw. But"--and Mrs. Tucker spoke with genuine modesty--"I tell
him I don't deserve no credit for leaning on the Lord. If I
can trust Him in death, why not in life?"

"You've got a place? The church has----"

"Bless you, no," cried Mrs. Tucker. "Would I burden 'em with
myself, when there's so many that has to be looked after? No,
I go direct to the Lord."

"What are you going to do? What place have you got?"

"None as yet. But He'll provide something--something better'n
I deserve."

Susan had to turn away, to hide her pity--and her
disappointment. Not only was she not to be helped, but also
she must help another. "You might get a job at the hat
factory," said she.

Mrs. Tucker was delighted. "I knew it!" she cried. "Don't you
see how He looks after me?"

Susan persuaded Miss Tuohy to take Mrs. Tucker on. She could
truthfully recommend the old woman as a hard worker. They
moved into a room in a tenement in South Fifth Avenue. Susan
read in the paper about a model tenement and went to try for
what was described as real luxury in comfort and cleanliness.
She found that sort of tenements filled with middle-class
families on their way down in the world and making their last
stand against rising rents and rising prices. The model
tenement rents were far, far beyond her ability to pay. She
might as well think of moving to the Waldorf. She and Mrs.
Tucker had to be content with a dark room on the fifth floor,
opening on a damp air shaft whose odor was so foul that in
comparison the Clinton Place shaft was as the pure breath of
the open sky. For this shelter--more than one-half the free
and proud citizens of prosperous America dwelling in cities
occupy its like, or worse they paid three dollars a week--a
dollar and a half apiece. They washed their underclothing at
night, slept while it was drying. And Susan, who could not
bring herself to imitate the other girls and wear a blouse of
dark color that was not to be washed, rose at four to do the
necessary ironing. They did their own cooking. It was no
longer possible for Susan to buy quality and content herself
with small quantity. However small the quantity of food she
could get along on, it must be of poor quality--for good
quality was beyond her means.

It maddened her to see the better class of working girls.
Their fairly good clothing, their evidences of some comfort at
home, seemed to mock at her as a poor fool who was being beaten
down because she had not wit enough to get on. She knew these
girls were either supporting themselves in part by prostitution
or were held up by their families, by the pooling of the
earnings of several persons. Left to themselves, to their own
earnings at work, they would be no better off than she, or at
best so little better off that the difference was unimportant.
If to live decently in New York took an income of fifteen
dollars a week, what did it matter whether one got five or ten
or twelve? Any wages below fifteen meant a steady downward
drag--meant exposure to the dirt and poison of poverty
tenements--meant the steady decline of the power of resistance,
the steady oozing away of self-respect, of the courage and hope
that give the power to rise. To have less than the fifteen
dollars absolutely necessary for decent surroundings, decent
clothing, decent food--that meant one was drowning. What
matter whether the death of the soul was quick, or slow,
whether the waters of destruction were twenty feet deep or
twenty thousand?

Mrs. Reardon, the servant woman on the top floor, was evicted
and Susan and Mrs. Tucker took her in. She protested that she
could sleep on the floor, that she had done so a large part of
her life--that she preferred it to most beds. But Susan made
her up a kind of bed in the corner. They would not let her pay
anything. She had rheumatism horribly, some kind of lung
trouble, and the almost universal and repulsive catarrh that
preys upon working people. Her hair had dwindled to a meager
wisp. This she wound into a hard little knot and fastened with
an imitation tortoise-shell comb, huge, high, and broken, set
with large pieces of glass cut like diamonds. Her teeth were
all gone and her cheeks almost met in her mouth.

One day, when Mrs. Tucker and Mrs. Reardon were exchanging
eulogies upon the goodness of God to them, Susan shocked them
by harshly ordering them to be silent. "If God hears you," she
said, "He'll think you're mocking Him. Anyhow, I can't stand
any more of it. Hereafter do your talking of that kind when
I'm not here."

Another day Mrs. Reardon told about her sister. The sister had
worked in a factory where some sort of poison that had a
rotting effect on the human body was used in the manufacture.
Like a series of others the sister caught the disease. But
instead of rotting out a spot, a few fingers, or part of the
face, it had eaten away the whole of her lower jaw so that she
had to prepare her food for swallowing by first pressing it
with her fingers against her upper teeth. Used as Susan was to
hearing horrors in this region where disease and accident
preyed upon every family, she fled from the room and walked
shuddering about the streets--the streets with their incessant
march past of blighted and blasted, of maimed and crippled and
worm-eaten. Until that day Susan had been about as unobservant
of the obvious things as is the rest of the race. On that day
she for the first time noticed the crowd in the street, with
mind alert to signs of the ravages of accident and disease.
Hardly a sound body, hardly one that was not piteously and
hideously marked.

When she returned--and she did not stay out long--Mrs. Tucker
was alone. Said she:

"Mrs. Reardon says the rotten jaw was sent on her sister as a
punishment for marrying a Protestant, she being a Catholic.
How ignorant some people is! Of course, the good Lord sent the
judgment on her for being a Catholic at all."

"Mrs. Tucker," said Susan, "did you ever hear of Nero?"

"He burned up Rome--and he burned up the Christian martyrs,"
said Mrs. Tucker. "I had a good schooling. Besides, sermons
is highly educating."

"Well," said Susan, "if I had a choice of living under Nero or
of living under that God you and Mrs. Reardon talk about, I'd
take Nero and be thankful and happy."

Mrs. Tucker would have fled if she could have afforded it. As
it was all she ventured was a sigh and lips moving in prayer.

On a Friday in late October, at the lunch hour, Susan was
walking up and down the sunny side of Broadway. It was the
first distinctly cool day of the autumn; there had been a heavy
downpour of rain all morning, but the New York sun that is ever
struggling to shine and is successful on all but an occasional
day was tearing up and scattering the clouds with the aid of a
sharp north wind blowing down the deep canyon. She was wearing
her summer dress still--old and dingy but clean. That look of
neatness about the feet--that charm of a well-shaped foot and
a well-turned ankle properly set off--had disappeared--with her
the surest sign of the extreme of desperate poverty. Her shoes
were much scuffed, were even slightly down at the heel; her
sailor hat would have looked only the worse had it had a fresh
ribbon on its crown. This first hint of winter had stung her
fast numbing faculties into unusual activity. She was
remembering the misery of the cold in Cincinnati--the misery
that had driven her into prostitution as a drunken driver's
lash makes the frenzied horse rush he cares not where in his
desire to escape. This wind of Broadway--this first warning of
winter--it was hissing in her ears: "Take hold! Winter is
coming! Take hold!"

Summer and winter--fiery heat and brutal cold. Like the devils
in the poem, the poor--the masses, all but a few of the human
race--were hurried from fire to ice, to vary their torment and
to make it always exquisite.

To shelter herself for a moment she paused at a spot that
happened to be protected to the south by a projecting sidewalk
sign. She was facing, with only a tantalizing sheet of glass
between, a display of winter underclothes on wax figures. To
show them off more effectively the sides and the back of the
window were mirrors. Susan's gaze traveled past the figures to
a person she saw standing at full length before her. "Who is
that pale, stooped girl?" she thought. "How dreary and sad she
looks! How hard she is fighting to make her clothes look
decent, when they aren't! She must be something like me--only
much worse off." And then she realized that she was gazing at
her own image, was pitying her own self. The room she and Mrs.
Tucker and the old scrubwoman occupied was so dark, even with
its one little gas jet lighted, that she was able to get only
a faint look at herself in the little cracked and water-marked
mirror over its filthy washstand--filthy because the dirt was so
ground in that only floods of water and bars of soap could have
cleaned down to its original surface. She was having a clear
look at herself for the first time in three months.

She shrank in horror, yet gazed on fascinated. Why, her
physical charm had gone gone, leaving hardly a trace! Those
dull, hollow eyes--that thin and almost ghastly face--the
emaciated form--the once attractive hair now looking poor and
stringy because it could not be washed properly--above all, the
sad, bitter expression about the mouth. Those pale lips! Her
lips had been from childhood one of her conspicuous and most
tempting beauties; and as the sex side of her nature had
developed they had bloomed into wonderful freshness and
vividness of form and color. Now----

Those pale, pale lips! They seemed to form a sort of climax of
tragedy to the melancholy of her face. She gazed on and on.
She noted every detail. How she had fallen! Indeed, a fallen
woman! These others had been born to the conditions that were
destroying her; they were no worse off, in many cases better
off. But she, born to comfort and custom of intelligent
educated associations and associates----

A fallen woman!

Honest work! Even if it were true that this honest work was a
sort of probation through which one rose to better things--even
if this were true, could it be denied that only a few at best
could rise, that the most--including all the sensitive, and
most of the children--must wallow on, must perish? Oh, the
lies, the lies about honest work!

Rosa Mohr, a girl of her own age who worked in the same room,
joined her. "Admiring yourself?" she said laughing. "Well, I
don't blame you. You _are_ pretty."

Susan at first thought Rosa was mocking her. But the tone and
expression were sincere.

"It won't last long," Rosa went on. "I wasn't so bad myself
when I quit the high school and took a job because father lost
his business and his health. He got in the way of one of those
trusts. So of course they handed it to him good and hard. But
he wasn't a squealer. He always said they'd done only what
he'd been doing himself if he'd had the chance. I always think
of what papa used to say when I hear people carrying on about
how wicked this or that somebody else is."

"Are you going to stay on--at this life?" asked Susan, still
looking at her own image.

"I guess so. What else is there? . . . I've got a steady.
We'll get married as soon as he has a raise to twelve per. But
I'll not be any better off. My beau's too stupid ever to make
much. If you see me ten years from now I'll probably be a fat,
sloppy old thing, warming a window sill or slouching about in
dirty rags."

"Isn't there any way to--to escape?"

"It does look as though there ought to be--doesn't it? But
I've thought and thought, and __I__ can't see it--and I'm pretty
near straight Jew. They say things are better than they used
to be, and I guess they are. But not enough better to help me
any. Perhaps my children--_if_ I'm fool enough to have
any--perhaps they'll get a chance. . . . But I wouldn't
gamble on it."

Susan was still looking at her rags--at her pale lips--was
avoiding meeting her own eyes. "Why not try the streets?"

"Nothing in it," said Rosa, practically. "I did try it for a
while and quit. Lots of the girls do, and only the fools stay
at it. Once in a while there's a girl who's lucky and gets a
lover that's kind to her or a husband that can make good. But
that's luck. For one that wins out, a thousand lose."

"Luck?" said Susan.

Rosa laughed. "You're right. It's something else besides
luck. The trouble is a girl loses her head--falls in
love--supports a man--takes to drink--don't look out for her
health--wastes her money. Still--where's the girl with head
enough to get on where there's so many temptations?"

"But there's no chance at all, keeping straight, you say."

"The other thing's worse. The street girls--of our class, I
mean--don't average as much as we do. And it's an awful
business in winter. And they spend so much time in station
houses and over on the Island. And, gosh! how the men do
treat them! You haven't any idea. You wouldn't believe the
horrible things the girls have to do to earn their money--a
quarter or half a dollar--and maybe the men don't pay them even
that. A girl tries to get her money in advance, but often she
doesn't. And as they have to dress better than we do, and live
where they can clean up a little, they 'most starve. Oh, that
life's hell."

Susan had turned away from her image, was looking at Rosa.

"As for the fast houses----" Rosa shuddered--"I was in one for
a week. I ran away--it was the only way I could escape. I'd
never tell any human being what I went through in that house. . . .
Never!" She watched Susan's fine sympathetic face, and
in a burst of confidence said: "One night the landlady sent me
up with seventeen men. And she kept the seventeen dollars I
made, and took away from me half a dollar one drunken
longshoreman gave me as a present. She said I owed it for
board and clothes. In those houses, high and low, the girls
always owes the madam. They haven't a stitch of their own to
their backs."

The two girls stood facing each other, each looking past the
other into the wind-swept canyon of Broadway--the majestic
vista of lofty buildings, symbols of wealth and luxury so
abundant that it flaunted itself, overflowed in gaudy
extravagance. Finally Susan said:

"Do you ever think of killing yourself?"

"I thought I would," replied the other girl. "But I guess I
wouldn't have. Everybody knows there's no hope, yet they keep
on hopin'. And I've got pretty good health yet, and once in a
while I have some fun. You ought to go to dances--and drink.
You wouldn't be blue _all_ the time, then."

"If it wasn't for the sun," said Susan.

"The sun?" inquired Rosa.

"Where I came from," explained Susan, "it rained a great deal,
and the sky was covered so much of the time. But here in New
York there is so much sun. I love the sun. I get
desperate--then out comes the sun, and I say to myself, `Well,
I guess I can go on a while longer, with the sun to help me.'"

"I hadn't thought of it," said Rosa, "but the sun is a help."

That indefatigable New York sun! It was like Susan's own
courage. It fought the clouds whenever clouds dared to appear
and contest its right to shine upon the City of the Sun, and
hardly a day was so stormy that for a moment at least the sun
did not burst through for a look at its beloved.

For weeks Susan had eaten almost nothing. During her previous
sojourn in the slums--the slums of Cincinnati, though they were
not classed as slums--the food had seemed revolting. But she
was less discriminating then. The only food she could afford
now--the food that is the best obtainable for a majority of the
inhabitants of any city--was simply impossible for her. She
ate only when she could endure no longer. This starvation no
doubt saved her from illness; but at the same time it drained
her strength. Her vitality had been going down, a little each
day--lower and lower. The poverty which had infuriated her at
first was now acting upon her like a soothing poison. The
reason she had not risen to revolt was this slow and subtle
poison that explains the inertia of the tenement poor from
babyhood. To be spirited one must have health or a nervous
system diseased in some of the ways that cause constant
irritation. The disease called poverty is not an irritant, but
an anesthetic. If Susan had been born to that life, her
naturally vivacious temperament would have made her gay in
unconscious wretchedness; as it was, she knew her own misery
and suffered from it keenly--at times hideously--yet was
rapidly losing the power to revolt.

Perhaps it was the wind--yes, it must have been the wind with
its threat of winter--that roused her sluggish blood, that
whipped thought into action. Anything--anything would be right,
if it promised escape. Right--wrong! Hypocritical words for
comfortable people!

That Friday night, after her supper of half-cooked corn meal
and tea, she went instantly to work at washing out clothes.
Mrs. Tucker spent the evening gossiping with the janitress,
came in about midnight. As usual she was full to the brim with
news of misery--of jobs lost, abandoned wives, of abused
children, of poisoning from rotten "fresh" food or from
"embalmed" stuff in cans, of sickness and yet more sickness, of
maiming accidents, of death--news that is the commonplace of
tenement life. She loved to tell these tales with all the
harrowing particulars and to find in each some evidence of the
goodness of God to herself. Often Susan could let her run on
and on without listening. But not that night. She resisted
the impulse to bid her be silent, left the room and stood at
the hall window. When she returned Mrs. Tucker was in bed, was
snoring in a tranquillity that was the reverse of contagious.
With her habitual cheerfulness she had adapted herself to her
changed condition without fretting. She had become as ragged
and as dirty as her neighbors; she so wrought upon Susan's
sensibilities, blunted though they were, that the girl would
have been unable to sleep in the same bed if she had not always
been tired to exhaustion when she lay down. But for that
matter only exhaustion could have kept her asleep in that
vermin-infested hole. Even the fiercest swarms of the insects
that flew or ran or crawled and bit, even the filthy mice
squeaking as they played upon the covers or ran over the faces
of the sleepers, did not often rouse her.

While Mrs. Tucker snored, Susan worked on, getting every piece
of at all fit clothing in her meager wardrobe into the best
possible condition. She did not once glance at the face of the
noisy sleeper--a face homely enough in Mrs. Tucker's waking
hours, hideous now with the mouth open and a few scattered
rotten teeth exposed, and the dark yellow-blue of the unhealthy
gums and tongue.

At dawn Mrs. Tucker awoke with a snort and a start. She rubbed
her eyes with her dirty and twisted and wrinkled fingers--the
nails were worn and broken, turned up as if warped at the
edges, blackened with dirt and bruisings. "Why, are you up
already?" she said to Susan.

"I've not been to bed," replied the girl.

The woman stretched herself, sat up, thrust her thick,
stockinged legs over the side of the bed. She slept in all her
clothing but her skirt, waist, and shoes. She kneeled down
upon the bare, sprung, and slanting floor, said a prayer, arose
with a beaming face. "It's nice and warm in the room. How I
do dread the winter, the cold weather--though no doubt we'll
make out all right! Everything always does turn out well for
me. The Lord takes care of me. I must make me a cup of tea."

"I've made it," said Susan.

The tea was frightful stuff--not tea at all, but cheap
adulterants colored poisonously. Everything they got was of
the same quality; yet the prices they paid for the tiny
quantities they were able to buy at any one time were at a rate
that would have bought the finest quality at the most expensive
grocery in New York.

"Wonder why Mrs. Reardon don't come?" said Mrs. Tucker. Mrs.
Reardon had as her only work a one night job at scrubbing.
"She ought to have come an hour ago."

"Her rheumatism was bad when she started," said Susan. "I
guess she worked slow."

When Mrs. Tucker had finished her second cup she put on her
shoes, overskirt and waist, made a few passes at her hair.
She was ready to go to work.

Susan looked at her, murmured: "An honest, God-fearing working woman!"

"Huh?" said Mrs. Tucker.

"Nothing," replied Susan who would not have permitted her to
hear. It would be cruel to put such ideas before one doomed
beyond hope.

Susan was utterly tired, but even the strong craving for a
stimulant could not draw that tea past her lips. She ate a
piece of dry bread, washed her face, neck, and hands. It was
time to start for the factory.

That day--Saturday--was a half-holiday. Susan drew her week's
earnings--four dollars and ten cents--and came home. Mrs.
Tucker, who had drawn--"thanks to the Lord"--three dollars and
a quarter, was with her. The janitress halted them as they
passed and told them that Mrs. Reardon was dead. She looked
like another scrubwoman, living down the street, who was known
always to carry a sum of money in her dress pocket, the banks
being untrustworthy. Mrs. Reardon, passing along in the dusk
of the early morning, had been hit on the head with a
blackjack. The one blow had killed her.

Violence, tragedy of all kinds, were too commonplace in that
neighborhood to cause more than a slight ripple. An old
scrubwoman would have had to die in some peculiarly awful way
to receive the flattery of agitating an agitated street. Mrs.
Reardon had died what was really almost a natural death. So
the faint disturbance of the terrors of life had long since
disappeared. The body was at the Morgue, of course.

"We'll go up, right away," said Mrs. Tucker.

"I've something to do that can't be put, off," replied Susan.

"I don't like for anyone as young as you to be so hard,"
reproached Mrs. Tucker.

"Is it hard," said Susan, "to see that death isn't nearly so
terrible as life? She's safe and at peace. I've got to _live_."

Mrs. Tucker, eager for an emotional and religious opportunity,
hastened away. Susan went at her wardrobe ironing, darning,
fixing buttonholes, hooks and eyes. She drew a bucket of water
from the tap in the hall and proceeded to wash her hair with
soap; she rinsed it, dried it as well as she could with their
one small, thin towel, left it hanging free for the air to
finish the job.

It had rained all the night before--the second heavy rain in
two months. But at dawn the rain had ceased, and the clouds
had fled before the sun that rules almost undisputed nine
months of the year and wars valiantly to rule the other three
months--not altogether in vain. A few golden strays found
their way into that cavelike room and had been helping her
wonderfully. She bathed herself and scrubbed herself from head
to foot. She manicured her nails, got her hands and feet into
fairly good condition. She put on her best underclothes, her
one remaining pair of undarned stockings, the pair of ties she
had been saving against an emergency. And once more she had
the charm upon which she most prided herself--the charm of an
attractive look about the feet and ankles. She then took up
the dark-blue hat frame--one of a lot of "seconds"--she had
bought for thirty-five cents at a bargain sale, trimmed it with
a broad dark-blue ribbon for which she had paid sixty cents.
She was well pleased--and justly so--with the result. The
trimmed hat might well have cost ten or fifteen dollars--for
the largest part of the price of a woman's hat is usually the
taste of the arrangement of the trimming.

By this time her hair was dry. She did it up with a care she
had not had time to give it in many a week. She put on the
dark-blue serge skirt of the between seasons dress she had
brought with her from Forty-fourth Street; she had not worn it
at all. With the feeble aid of the mirror that distorted her
image into grotesqueness, she put on her hat with the care that
important detail of a woman's toilet always deserves.

She completed her toilet with her one good and unworn
blouse--plain white, the yoke gracefully pointed--and with a
blue neck piece she had been saving. She made a bundle of all
her clothing that was fit for anything--including the unworn
batiste dress Jeffries and Jonas had given her. And into it
she put the pistol she had brought away from Forty-fourth
Street. She made a separate bundle of the Jeffries and Jonas
hat with its valuable plumes. With the two bundles she
descended and went to a pawnshop in Houston Street, to which
she had made several visits.

A dirty-looking man with a short beard fluffy and thick like a
yellow hen's tail lurked behind the counter in the dark little
shop. She put her bundles on the counter, opened them. "How
much can I get for these things?" she asked.

The man examined every piece minutely. "There's really nothing
here but the summer dress and the hat," said he. "And they're
out of style. I can't give you more than four dollars for the
lot--and one for the pistol which is good but old style now.
Five dollars. How'll you have it?"

Susan folded the things and tied up the bundles. "Sorry to
have troubled you," she said, taking one in either hand.

"How much did you expect to get, lady?" asked the pawnbroker.

"Twenty-five dollars."

He laughed, turned toward the back of the shop. As she reached
the door he called from his desk at which he seemed about to
seat himself, "I might squeeze you out ten dollars."

"The plumes on the hat will sell for thirty dollars," said
Susan. "You know as well as I do that ostrich feathers have
gone up."

The man slowly advanced. "I hate to see a customer go away
unsatisfied," said he. "I'll give you twenty dollars."

"Not a cent less than twenty-five. At the next place I'll ask
thirty--and get it."

"I never can stand out against a lady. Give me the stuff."

Susan put it on the counter again. Said she:

"I don't blame you for trying to do me. You're right to try to
buy your way out of hell."

The pawnbroker reflected, could not understand this subtlety,
went behind his counter. He produced a key from his pocket,
unlocked a drawer underneath and took out a large tin box.
With another key from another pocket he unlocked this, threw
back the lid revealing a disorder of papers. From the depths
he fished a paper bag. This contained a roll of bills. He
gave Susan a twenty and a five, both covered with dirt so
thickly that she could scarcely make out the denominations.

"You'll have to give me cleaner money than this," said she.

"You are a fine lady," grumbled he. But he found cleaner bills.

She turned to her room. At sight of her Mrs. Tucker burst out
laughing with delight. "My, but you do look like old times!"
cried she. "How neat and tasty you are! I suppose it's no
need to ask if you're going to church?"

"No," said Susan. "I've got nothing to give, and I don't beg."

"Well, I ain't going there myself, lately--somehow. They got
so they weren't very cordial--or maybe it was me thinking that
way because I wasn't dressed up like. Still I do wish you was
more religious. But you'll come to it, for you're naturally a
good girl. And when you do, the Lord'll give you a more
contented heart. Not that you complain. I never knew anybody,
especially a young person, that took things so quiet. . . .
It can't be you're going to a dance?"

"No," said Susan. "I'm going to leave--go back uptown."

Mrs. Tucker plumped down upon the bed. "Leave for good?" she gasped.

"I've got Nelly Lemayer to take my place here, if you want her,"
said Susan. "Here is my share of the rent for next week and
half a dollar for the extra gas I've burned last night and today."

"And Mrs. Reardon gone, too!" sobbed Mrs. Tucker, suddenly
remembering the old scrubwoman whom both had forgotten. "And
up to that there Morgue they wouldn't let me see her except
where the light was so poor that I couldn't rightly swear it
was her. How brutal everybody is to the poor! If they didn't
have the Lord, what would become of them! And you leaving me
all alone!"

The sobs rose into hysteria. Susan stood impassive. She had
seen again and again how faint the breeze that would throw
those shallow waters into commotion and how soon they were
tranquil again. It was by observing Mrs. Tucker that she first
learned an important unrecognized truth about human nature that
amiable, easily sympathetic and habitually good-humored people
are invariably hard of heart. In this parting she had no sense
of loss, none of the melancholy that often oppresses us when we
separate from someone to whom we are indifferent yet feel bound
by the tie of misfortunes borne together. Mrs. Tucker, fallen
into the habits of their surroundings, was for her simply part
of them. And she was glad she was leaving them--forever, she
hoped. _Christian_, fleeing the City of Destruction, had no
sterner mandate to flight than her instinct was suddenly urging
upon her.

When Mrs. Tucker saw that her tears were not appreciated, she
decided that they were unnecessary. She dried her eyes and said:

"Anyhow, I reckon Mrs. Reardon's taking-off was a mercy."

"She's better dead," said Susan. She had abhorred the old
woman, even as she pitied and sheltered her. She had a way of
fawning and cringing and flattering--no doubt in well meaning
attempt to show gratitude--but it was unendurable to Susan.
And now that she was dead and gone, there was no call for
further pretenses.

"You ain't going right away?" said Mrs. Tucker.

"Yes," said Susan.

"You ought to stay to supper."

Supper! That revolting food! "No, I must go right away,"
replied Susan.

"Well, you'll come to see me. And maybe you'll be back with
us. You might go farther and do worse. On my way from the
morgue I dropped in to see a lady friend on the East Side. I
guess the good Lord has abandoned the East Side, there being
nothing there but Catholics and Jews, and no true religion.
It's dreadful the way things is over there--the girls are
taking to the streets in droves. My lady friend was telling me
that some of the mothers is sending their little girls out
streetwalking, and some's even taking out them that's too young
to be trusted to go alone. And no money in it, at that. And
food and clothing prices going up and up. Meat and vegetables
two and three times what they was a few years ago. And rents!"
Mrs. Tucker threw up her hands.

"I must be going," said Susan. "Good-by."

She put out her hand, but Mrs. Tucker insisted on kissing her.
She crossed Washington Square, beautiful in the soft evening
light, and went up Fifth Avenue. She felt that she was
breathing the air of a different world as she walked along the
broad clean sidewalk with the handsome old houses on either
side, with carriages and automobiles speeding past, with clean,
happy-faced, well dressed human beings in sight everywhere. It
was like coming out of the dank darkness of Dismal Swamp into
smiling fields with a pure, star-spangled sky above. She was
free--free! It might be for but a moment; still it was freedom,
infinitely sweet because of past slavery and because of the
fear of slavery closing in again. She had abandoned the old
toilet articles. She had only the clothes she was wearing, the
thirty-one dollars divided between her stockings, and the
two-dollar bill stuffed into the palm of her left glove.

She had walked but a few hundred feet. She had advanced into
a region no more prosperous to the eye than that she had been
working in every day. Yet she had changed her world--because
she had changed her point of view. The strata that form
society lie in roughly parallel lines one above the other. The
flow of all forms of the currents of life is horizontally along
these strata, never vertically from one stratum to another.
These strata, lying apparently in contact, one upon another,
are in fact abysmally separated. There is not--and in the
nature of things never can be any genuine human sympathy
between any two strata. We _sympathize_ in our own stratum, or
class; toward other strata--other classes--our attitude is
necessarily a looking up or a looking down. Susan, a bit of
flotsam, ascending, descending, ascending across the social
layers--belonging nowhere having attachments, not sympathies,
a real settled lot nowhere--Susan was once more upward bound.

At the corner of Fourteenth Street there was a shop with large
mirrors in the show windows. She paused to examine herself.
She found she had no reason to be disturbed about her
appearance. Her dress and hat looked well; her hair was
satisfactory; the sharp air had brought some life to the pallor
of her cheeks, and the release from the slums had restored some
of the light to her eyes. "Why did I stay there so long?" she
demanded of herself. Then, "How have I suddenly got the
courage to leave?" She had no answer to either question. Nor
did she care for an answer. She was not even especially
interested in what was about to happen to her.

The moment she found herself above Twenty-third Street and in
the old familiar surroundings, she felt an irresistible longing
to hear about Rod Spenser. She was like one who has been on a
far journey, leaving behind him everything that has been life
to him; he dismisses it all because he must, until he finds
himself again in his own country, in his old surroundings.
She went into the Hoffman House and at the public telephone
got the _Herald_ office. "Is Mr. Drumley there?"

"No," was the reply. "He's gone to Europe."

"Did Mr. Spenser go with him?"

"Mr. Spenser isn't here--hasn't been for a long time.

He's abroad too. Who is this?"

"Thank you," said Susan, hanging up the receiver.

She drew a deep breath of relief.

She left the hotel by the women's entrance in Broadway. It was
six o'clock. The sky was clear--a typical New York sky with
air that intoxicated blowing from it--air of the sea--air of
the depths of heaven. A crescent moon glittered above the
Diana on the Garden tower. It was Saturday night and Broadway
was thronged--with men eager to spend in pleasure part of the
week's wages or salary they had just drawn; with women
sparkling-eyed and odorous of perfumes and eager to help the
men. The air was sharp--was the ocean air of New York at its
delicious best. And the slim, slightly stooped girl with the
earnest violet-gray eyes and the sad bitter mouth from whose
lips the once brilliant color had now fled was ready for
whatever might come. She paused at the corner, and gazed up
brilliantly lighted Broadway.

"Now!" she said half aloud and, like an expert swimmer
adventuring the rapids, she advanced into the swift-moving
crowd of the highway of New York's gayety. V

AT the corner of Twenty-sixth Street a man put himself squarely
across her path. She was attracted by the twinkle in his
good-natured eyes. He was a youngish man, had the stoutness of
indulgence in a fondness for eating and drinking--but the
stoutness was still well within the bounds of decency. His
clothing bore out the suggestion of his self-assured way of
stopping her--the suggestion of a confidence-giving prosperity.

"You look as if you needed a drink, too," said he. "How about
it, lady with the lovely feet?"

For the first time in her life she was feeling on an equality
with man. She gave him the same candidly measuring glance that
man gives man. She saw good-nature, audacity without
impudence--at least not the common sort of impudence. She
smiled merrily, glad of the chance to show her delight that she
was once more back in civilization after the long sojourn in
the prison workshops where it is manufactured. She said:

"A drink? Thank you--yes."

"That's a superior quality of smile you've got there," said he.
"That, and those nice slim feet of yours ought to win for you
anywhere. Let's go to the Martin."

"Down University Place?"

The stout young man pointed his slender cane across the street.
"You must have been away."

"Yes," said the girl. "I've been--dead."

"I'd like to try that myself--if I could be sure of coming to
life in little old New York." And he looked round with
laughing eyes as if the lights, the crowds, the champagne-like
air intoxicated him.

At the first break in the thunderous torrent of traffic they
crossed Broadway and went in at the Twenty-sixth Street
entrance. The restaurant, to the left, was empty. Its little
tables were ready, however, for the throng of diners soon to
come. Susan had difficulty in restraining herself. She was
almost delirious with delight. She was agitated almost to
tears by the freshness, the sparkle in the glow of the
red-shaded candles, in the colors and odors of the flowers
decorating every table. While she had been down there all this
had been up here--waiting for her! Why had she stayed down
there? But then, why had she gone? What folly, what madness!
To suffer such horrors for no reason--beyond some vague,
clinging remnant of a superstition--or had it been just plain
insanity? "Yes, I've been crazy--out of my head. The break
with--Rod--upset my mind."

Her companion took her into the cafe to the right. He seated
her on one of the leather benches not far from the door, seated
himself in a chair opposite; there was a narrow marble-topped
table between them. On Susan's right sat a too conspicuously
dressed but somehow important looking actress; on her left, a
shopkeeper's fat wife. Opposite each woman sat the sort of man
one would expect to find with her. The face of the actress's
man interested her. It was a long pale face, the mouth weary,
in the eyes a strange hot fire of intense enthusiasm. He was
young--and old--and neither. Evidently he had lived every
minute of every year of his perhaps forty years. He was
wearing a quiet suit of blue and his necktie was of a darker
shade of the same color. His clothes were draped upon his good
figure with a certain fascinating distinction. He was smoking
an unusually long and thick cigarette. The slender strong
white hand he raised and lowered was the hand of an artist. He
might be a bad man, a very bad man--his face had an expression
of freedom, of experience, that made such an idea as
conventionality in connection with him ridiculous. But however
bad he might be, Susan felt sure it would be an artistic kind
of badness, without vulgarity. He might have reached the stage
at which morality ceases to be a conviction, a matter of
conscience, and becomes a matter of preference, of tastes--and
he surely had good taste in conduct no less than in dress and
manner. The woman with him evidently wished to convince him
that she loved him, to convince those about her that they were
lovers; the man evidently knew exactly what she had in
mind--for he was polite, attentive, indifferent, and--Susan
suspected--secretly amused.

Susan's escort leaned toward her and said in a low tone, "The
two at the next table--the woman's Mary Rigsdall, the actress,
and the man's Brent, the fellow who writes plays." Then in a
less cautious tone, "What are you drinking?"

"What are _you_ drinking?" asked Susan, still covertly watching Brent.

"You are going to dine with me?"

"I've no engagement."

"Then let's have Martinis--and I'll go get a table and order
dinner while the waiter's bringing them."

When Susan was alone, she gazed round the crowded cafe, at the
scores of interesting faces--thrillingly interesting to her
after her long sojourn among countenances merely expressing
crude elemental appetites if anything at all beyond toil,
anxiety, privation, and bad health. These were the faces of
the triumphant class--of those who had wealth or were getting
it, fame or were striving for it, of those born to or acquiring
position of some sort among the few thousands who lord it over
the millions. These were the people among whom she belonged.
Why was she having such a savage struggle to attain it? Then,
all in an instant the truth she had been so long groping for in
vain flung itself at her. None of these women, none of the
women of the prosperous classes would be there but for the
assistance and protection of the men. She marveled at her
stupidity in not having seen the obvious thing clearly long
ago. The successful women won their success by disposing of
their persons to advantage--by getting the favor of some man of
ability. Therefore, she, a woman, must adopt that same policy
if she was to have a chance at the things worth while in life.
She must make the best bargain--or series of bargains--she
could. And as her necessities were pressing she must lose no
time. She understood now the instinct that had forced her to
fly from South Fifth Avenue, that had overruled her hesitation
and had compelled her to accept the good-natured, prosperous
man's invitation. . . . There was no other way open to her.
She must not evade that fact; she must accept it. Other ways
there might be--for other women. But not for her, the outcast
without friends or family, the woman alone, with no one to lean
upon or to give her anything except in exchange for what she
had to offer that was marketable. She must make the bargain
she could, not waste time in the folly of awaiting a bargain to
her liking. Since she was living in the world and wished to
continue to live there, she must accept the world's terms. To
be sad or angry either one because the world did not offer her
as attractive terms as it apparently offered many other
women--the happy and respected wives and mothers of the
prosperous classes, for instance--to rail against that was
silly and stupid, was unworthy of her intelligence. She would
do as best she could, and move along, keeping her eyes open;
and perhaps some day a chance for much better terms might
offer--for the best--for such terms as that famous actress
there had got. She looked at Mary Rigsdall. An expression in
her interesting face--the latent rather than the surface
expression--set Susan to wondering whether, if she knew
Rigsdall's _whole_ story--or any woman's whole story--she might
not see that the world was not bargaining so hardly with her,
after all. Or any man's whole story. There her eyes shifted
to Rigsdall's companion, the famous playwright of whom she had
so often heard Rod and his friends talk.

She was startled to find that his gaze was upon her--an
all-seeing look that penetrated to the very core of her being.
He either did not note or cared nothing about her color of
embarrassment. He regarded her steadily until, so she felt, he
had seen precisely what she was, had become intimately
acquainted with her. Then he looked away. It chagrined her
that his eyes did not again turn in her direction; she felt
that he had catalogued her as not worth while. She listened to
the conversation of the two. The woman did the talking, and
her subject was herself--her ability as an actress, her
conception of some part she either was about to play or was
hoping to play. Susan, too young to have acquired more than
the rudiments of the difficult art of character study, even had
she had especial talent for it--which she had not--Susan
decided that the famous Rigsdall was as shallow and vain as Rod
had said all stage people were.

The waiter brought the cocktails and her stout young companion
came back, beaming at the thought of the dinner he had
painstakingly ordered. As he reached the table he jerked his
head in self-approval. "It'll be a good one," said he.
"Saturday night dinner--and after--means a lot to me. I work
hard all week. Saturday nights I cut loose. Sundays I sleep
and get ready to scramble again on Monday for the dollars." He
seated himself, leaned toward her with elevated glass. "What
name?" inquired he.

"Susan."

"That's a good old-fashioned name. Makes me see the
hollyhocks, and the hens scratching for worms. Mine's Howland.
Billy Howland. I came from Maryland . . . and I'm mighty
glad I did. I wouldn't be from anywhere else for worlds, and
I wouldn't be there for worlds. Where do you hail from?"

"The West," said Susan.

"Well, the men in your particular corner out yonder must be a
pretty poor lot to have let you leave. I spotted you for mine
the minute I saw you--Susan. I hope you're not as quiet as
your name. Another cocktail?"

"Thanks."

"Like to drink?"

"I'm going to do more of it hereafter."

"Been laying low for a while--eh?"

"Very low," said Susan. Her eyes were sparkling now; the
cocktail had begun to stir her long languid blood.

"Live with your family?"

"I haven't any. I'm free."

"On the stage?"

"I'm thinking of going on."

"And meanwhile?"

"Meanwhile--whatever comes."

Billy Howland's face was radiant. "I had a date tonight and
the lady threw me down. One of those drummer's wives that take
in washing to add to the family income while hubby's flirting
round the country. This hubby came home unexpectedly. I'm
glad he did."

He beamed with such whole-souled good-nature that Susan
laughed. "Thanks. Same to you," said she.

"Hope you're going to do a lot of that laughing," said he.
"It's the best I've heard--such a quiet, gay sound. I sure do
have the best luck. Until five years ago there was nothing
doing for Billy--hall bedroom--Wheeling stogies--one shirt and
two pairs of cuffs a week--not enough to buy a lady an
ice-cream soda. All at once--bang! The hoodoo busted, and
everything that arrived was for William C. Howland. Better
get aboard."

"Here I am."

"Hold on tight. I pay no attention to the speed laws, and
round the corners on two wheels. Do you like good things to eat?"

"I haven't eaten for six months."

"You must have been out home. Ah!--There's the man to tell us
dinner's ready."

They finished the second cocktail. Susan was pleased to note
that Brent was again looking at her; and she thought--though
she suspected it might be the cocktail--that there was a
question in his look--a question about her which he had been
unable to answer to his satisfaction. When she and Howland
were at one of the small tables against the wall in the
restaurant, she said to him:

"You know Mr. Brent?"

"The play man? Lord, no. I'm a plain business dub. He
wouldn't bother with me. You like that sort of man?"

"I want to get on the stage, if I can," was Susan's diplomatic reply.

"Well--let's have dinner first. I've ordered champagne, but if
you prefer something else----"

"Champagne is what I want. I hope it's very dry."

Howland's eyes gazed tenderly at her. "I do like a woman who
knows the difference between champagne and carbonated sirup.
I think you and I've got a lot of tastes in common. I like
eating--so do you. I like drinking--so do you. I like a good
time--so do you. You're a little bit thin for my taste, but
you'll fatten up. I wonder what makes your lips so pale."

"I'd hate to remind myself by telling you," said Susan.

The restaurant was filling. Most of the men and women were in
evening dress. Each arriving woman brought with her a new
exhibition of extravagance in costume, diffused a new variety
of powerful perfume. The orchestra in the balcony was playing
waltzes and the liveliest Hungarian music and the most sensuous
strains from Italy and France and Spain. And before her was
food!--food again!--not horrible stuff unfit for beasts, worse
than was fed to beasts, but human food--good things, well
cooked and well served. To have seen her, to have seen the
expression of her eyes, without knowing her history and without
having lived as she had lived, would have been to think her a
glutton. Her spirits giddied toward the ecstatic. She began
to talk--commenting on the people about her--the one subject she
could venture with her companion. As she talked and drank, he
ate and drank, stuffing and gorging himself, but with a
frankness of gluttony that delighted her. She found she could
not eat much, but she liked to see eating; she who had so long
been seeing only poverty, bolting wretched food and drinking
the vilest kinds of whiskey and beer, of alleged coffee and
tea--she reveled in Howland's exhibition. She must learn to
live altogether in her senses, never to think except about an
appetite. Where could she find a better teacher? . . .
They drank two quarts of champagne, and with the coffee she
took _creme de menthe_ and he brandy. And as the sensuous
temperament that springs from intense vitality reasserted
itself, the opportunity before her lost all its repellent
features, became the bright, vivid countenance of lusty youth,
irradiating the joy of living.

"I hear there's a lively ball up at Terrace Garden," said he.
"Want to go?"

"That'll be fine!" cried she.

She saw it would have taken nearly all the money she possessed
to have paid that bill. About four weeks' wages for one
dinner! Thousands of families living for two weeks on what she
and he had consumed in two hours! She reached for her half
empty champagne glass, emptied it. She must forget all those
things! "I've played the fool once. I've learned my lesson.
Surely I'll never do it again." As she drank, her eyes chanced
upon the clock. Half-past ten. Mrs. Tucker had probably just
fallen asleep. And Mrs. Reardon was going out to scrub--going
out limping and groaning with rheumatism. No, Mrs. Reardon was
lying up at the morgue dead, her one chance to live lost
forever. Dead! Yet better off than Mrs. Tucker lying alive.
Susan could see her--the seamed and broken and dirty old
remnant of a face--could see the vermin--and the mice could
hear the snoring--the angry grunt and turning over as the
insects----

"I want another drink--right away," she cried.

"Sure!" said Howland. "I need one more, too."

They drove in a taxi to Terrace Garden, he holding her in his
arms and kissing her with an intoxicated man's enthusiasm.
"You certainly are sweet," said he. "The wine on your breath
is like flowers. Gosh, but I'm glad that husband came home!
Like me a little?"

"I'm so happy, I feel like standing up and screaming," declared she.

"Good idea," cried he. Whereupon he released a war whoop and
they both went off into a fit of hysterical laughter. When it
subsided he said, "I sized you up as a live wire the minute I
saw you. But you're even better than I thought. What are you
in such a good humor about?"

"You couldn't understand if I told you," replied she. "You'd
have to go and live where I've been living--live there as long
as I have."

"Convent?"

"Worse. Worse than a jail."

The ball proved as lively as they hoped. A select company from
the Tenderloin was attending, and the regulars were all of the
gayest crowd among the sons and daughters of artisans and small
merchants up and down the East Side. Not a few of the women
were extremely pretty. All, or almost all, were young, and
those who on inspection proved to be older than eighteen or
twenty were acting younger than the youngest. Everyone had
been drinking freely, and continued to drink. The orchestra
played continuously. The air was giddy with laughter and song.
Couples hugged and kissed in corners, and finally openly on the
dancing floor. For a while Susan and Howland danced together.
But soon they made friends with the crowd and danced with
whoever was nearest. Toward three in the morning it flashed
upon her that she had not even seen him for many a dance. She
looked round--searched for him--got a blond-bearded man in
evening dress to assist her.

"The last seen of your stout friend," this man finally
reported, "he was driving away in a cab with a large lady from
Broadway. He was asleep, but I guess she wasn't."

A sober thought winked into her whirling brain--he had warned
her to hold on tight, and she had lost her head--and her
opportunity. A bad start--a foolishly bad start. But out
winked the glimpse of sobriety and Susan laughed. "That's the
last I'll ever see of _him_," said she.

This seemed to give Blond-Beard no regrets. Said he: "Let's
you and I have a little supper. I'd call it breakfast, only
then we couldn't have champagne."

And they had supper--six at the table, all uproarious, Susan
with difficulty restrained from a skirt dance on the table up
and down among the dishes and bottles. It was nearly five
o'clock when she and Blond-Beard helped each other toward a cab.

"What's your address?" said he.

"The same as yours," replied she drowsily.

Late that afternoon she established herself in a room with a
bath in West Twenty-ninth Street not far from Broadway. The
exterior of the house was dingy and down-at-the-heel. But the
interior was new and scrupulously clean. Several other young
women lived there alone also, none quite so well installed as
Susan, who had the only private bath and was paying twelve
dollars a week. The landlady, frizzled and peroxide,
explained--without adding anything to what she already
knew--that she could have "privileges," but cautioned her
against noise. "I can't stand for it," said she. "First
offense--out you go. This house is for ladies, and only
gentlemen that know how to conduct themselves as a gentleman
should with a lady are allowed to come here."

Susan paid a week in advance, reducing to thirty-one dollars
her capital which Blond-Beard had increased to forty-three.
The young lady who lived at the other end of the hall smiled at
her, when both happened to glance from their open doors at the
same time. Susan invited her to call and she immediately
advanced along the hall in the blue silk kimono she was wearing
over her nightgown.

"My name's Ida Driscoll," said she, showing a double row of
charming white teeth--her chief positive claim to beauty.

She was short, was plump about the shoulders but slender in the
hips. Her reddish brown hair was neatly done over a big rat,
and was so spread that its thinness was hidden well enough to
deceive masculine eyes. Nor would a man have observed that one
of her white round shoulders was full two inches higher than
the other. Her skin was good, her features small and
irregular, her eyes shrewd but kindly.

"My name's"--Susan hesitated--"Lorna Sackville."

"I guess Lorna and Ida'll be enough for us to bother to
remember," laughed Miss Driscoll. "The rest's liable to
change. You've just come, haven't you?"

"About an hour ago. I've got only a toothbrush, a comb, a
washrag and a cake of soap. I bought them on my way here."

"Baggage lost--eh?" said Ida, amused.

"No," admitted Susan. "I'm beginning an entire new deal."

"I'll lend you a nightgown. I'm too short for my other things
to fit you."

"Oh, I can get along. What's good for a headache? I'm nearly
crazy with it."

"Wine?"

"Yes."

"Wait a minute." Ida, with bedroom slippers clattering,
hurried back to her room, returned with a bottle of bromo
seltzer and in the bathroom fixed Susan a dose. "You'll feel
all right in half an hour or so. Gee, but you're swell--with
your own bathroom."

Susan shrugged her shoulders and laughed.

Ida shook her head gravely. "You ought to save your money. I do."

"Later--perhaps. Just now--I _must_ have a fling."

Ida seemed to understand. She went on to say: "I was in
millinery. But in this town there's nothing in anything unless
you have capital or a backer. I got tired of working for five
per, with ten or fifteen as the top notch. So I quit, kissed
my folks up in Harlem good-by and came down to look about. As
soon as I've saved enough I'm going to start a business. That'll
be about a couple of years--maybe sooner, if I find an angel."

"I'm thinking of the stage."

"Cut it out!" cried Ida. "It's on the bum. There's more money
and less worry in straight sporting--if you keep respectable.
Of course, there's nothing in out and out sporting."

"Oh, I haven't decided on anything. My head is better."

"Sure! If the dose I gave you don't knock it you can get one
at the drug store two blocks up Sixth Avenue that'll do the
trick. Got a dinner date?"

"No. I haven't anything on hand."

"I think you and I might work together," said Ida. "You're
thin and tallish. I'm short and fattish. We'd catch 'em
coming and going."

"That sounds good," said Susan.

"You're new to--to the business?"

"In a way--yes."

"I thought so. We all soon get a kind of a professional look.
You haven't got it. Still, so many dead respectable women
imitate nowadays, and paint and use loud perfumes, that
sporting women aren't nearly so noticeable. Seems to me the
men's tastes even for what they want at home are getting louder
and louder all the time. They hate anything that looks slow.
And in our business it's harder and harder to please them--except
the yaps from the little towns and the college boys. A woman
has to be up to snuff if she gets on. If she looks what she
is, men won't have her--nor if she is what she looks."

Susan had not lived where every form of viciousness is openly
discussed and practiced, without having learned the things
necessary to a full understanding of Ida's technical phrases
and references. The liveliness that had come with the
departure of the headache vanished. To change the subject she
invited Ida to dine with her.

"What's the use of your spending money in a restaurant?"
objected Ida. "You eat with me in my room. I always cook
myself something when I ain't asked out by some one of my
gentleman friends. I can cook you a chop and warm up a can of
French peas and some dandy tea biscuits I bought yesterday."

Susan accepted the invitation, promising that when she was
established she would reciprocate. As it was about six, they
arranged to have the dinner at seven, Susan to dress in the
meantime. The headache had now gone, even to that last
heaviness which seems to be an ominous threat of a return.
When she was alone, she threw off her clothes, filled the big
bathtub with water as hot as she could stand it. Into this she
gently lowered herself until she was able to relax and recline
without discomfort. Then she stood up and with the soap and
washrag gave herself the most thorough scrubbing of her life.
Time after time she soaped and rubbed and scrubbed, and dipped
herself in the hot water. When she felt that she had restored
her body to some where near her ideal of cleanness, she let the
water run out and refilled the tub with even hotter water. In
this she lay luxuriously, reveling in the magnificent
sensations of warmth and utter cleanliness. Her eyes closed;
a delicious languor stole over her and through her, soothing
every nerve. She slept.

She was awakened by Ida, who had entered after knocking and
calling at the outer door in vain. Susan slowly opened her
eyes, gazed at Ida with a soft dreamy smile. "You don't know
what this means. It seems to me I was never quite so
comfortable or so happy in my life."

"It's a shame to disturb you," said Ida. "But dinner's ready.
Don't stop to dress first. I'll bring you a kimono."

Susan turned on the cold water, and the bath rapidly changed
from warm to icy. When she had indulged in the sense of cold
as delightful in its way as the sense of warmth, she rubbed her
glowing skin with a rough towel until she was rose-red from
head to foot. Then she put on stockings, shoes and the pink
kimono Ida had brought, and ran along the hall to dinner. As
she entered Ida's room, Ida exclaimed, "How sweet and pretty
you do look! You sure ought to make a hit!"

"I feel like a human being for the first time in--it seems
years--ages--to me."

"You've got a swell color--except your lips. Have they always
been pale like that?"

"No."

"I thought not. It don't seem to fit in with your style. You
ought to touch 'em up. You look too serious and innocent,
anyhow. They make a rouge now that'll stick through
everything--eating, drinking--anything."

Susan regarded herself critically in the glass. "I'll see,"
she said.

The odor of the cooking chops thrilled Susan like music. She
drew a chair up to the table, sat in happy-go-lucky fashion,
and attacked the chop, the hot biscuit, and the peas, with an
enthusiasm that inspired Ida to imitation. "You know how to
cook a chop," she said to Ida. "And anybody who can cook a
chop right can cook. Cooking's like playing the piano. If you
can do the simple things perfectly, you're ready to do anything."

"Wait till I have a flat of my own," said Ida. "I'll show you
what eating means. And I'll have it, too, before very long.
Maybe we'll live together. I was to a fortune teller's
yesterday. That's the only way I waste money. I go to fortune
tellers nearly every day. But then all the girls do. You get
your money's worth in excitement and hope, whether there's
anything in it or not. Well, the fortune teller she said I was
to meet a dark, slender person who was to change the whole
course of my life--that all my troubles would roll away--and
that if any more came, they'd roll away, too. My, but she did
give me a swell fortune, and only fifty cents! I'll take you
to her."

Ida made black coffee and the two girls, profoundly contented,
drank it and talked with that buoyant cheerfulness which
bubbles up in youth on the slightest pretext. In this case the
pretext was anything but slight, for both girls had health as
well as youth, had that freedom from harassing responsibility
which is the chief charm of every form of unconventional life.
And Susan was still in the first flush of the joy of escape
from the noisome prison whose poisons had been corroding her,
soul and body. No, poison is not a just comparison; what
poison in civilization parallels, or even approaches, in
squalor, in vileness of food and air, in wretchedness of
shelter and clothing, the tenement life that is really the
typical life of the city? From time to time Susan, suffused
with the happiness that is too deep for laughter, too deep for
tears even, gazed round like a dreamer at those cheerful
comfortable surroundings and drew a long breath--stealthily, as
if she feared she would awaken and be again in South Fifth
Avenue, of rags and filth, of hideous toil without hope.

"You'd better save your money to put in the millinery business
with me," Ida advised. "I can show you how to make a lot.
Sometimes I clear as high as a hundred a week, and I don't
often fall below seventy-five. So many girls go about this
business in a no account way, instead of being regular and
businesslike."

Susan strove to hide the feelings aroused by this practical
statement of what lay before her. Those feelings filled her
with misgiving. Was the lesson still unlearned? Obviously Ida
was right; there must be plan, calculation, a definite line
laid out and held to, or there could not but be failure and
disaster. And yet--Susan's flesh quivered and shrank away.
She struggled against it, but she could not conquer it.
Experience had apparently been in vain; her character had
remained unchanged. . . . She must compel herself. She
must do what she had to do; she must not ruin everything by
imitating the people of the tenements with their fatal habit of
living from day to day only, and taking no thought for the
morrow except fatuously to hope and dream that all would be well.

While she was fighting with herself, Ida had been talking
on--the same subject. When Susan heard again, Ida was saying:

"Now, take me, for instance. I don't smoke or drink. There's
nothing in either one--especially drink. Of course sometimes
a girl's got to drink. A man watches her too close for her to
dodge out. But usually you can make him think you're as full
as he is, when you really are cold sober."

"Do the men always drink when they--come with--with--us?" asked Susan.

"Most always. They come because they want to turn themselves
loose. That's why a girl's got to be careful not to make a man
feel nervous or shy. A respectable woman's game is to be
modest and innocent. With us, the opposite. They're both
games; one's just as good as the other."

"I don't think I could get along at all--at this," confessed
Susan with an effort, "unless I drank too much--so that I was
reckless and didn't care what happened."

Ida looked directly into her eyes; Susan's glance fell and a
flush mounted. After a pause Ida went on:

"A girl does feel that way at first. A girl that marries as
most of them do--because the old ones are pushing her out of
the nest and she's got no place else to go--she feels the same
way till she hardens to it. Of course, you've got to get broke
into any business."

"Go on," said Susan eagerly. "You are so sensible. You must
teach me."

"Common sense is a thing you don't often hear--especially about
getting on in the world. But, as I was saying--one of my
gentlemen friends is a lawyer--such a nice fellow--so liberal.
Gives me a present of twenty or twenty-five extra, you
understand--every time he makes a killing downtown. He asked
me once how I felt when I started in; and when I told him, he
said, `That's exactly the way I felt the first time I won a
case for a client I knew was a dirty rascal and in the wrong.
But now--I take that sort of thing as easy as you do.' He says
the thing is to get on, no matter how, and that one way's as
good as another. And he's mighty right. You soon learn that
in little old New York, where you've got to have the mon. or
you get the laugh and the foot--the swift, hard kick. Clean up
after you've arrived, he says--and don't try to keep clean
while you're working--and don't stop for baths and things while
you're at the job."

Susan was listening with every faculty she possessed.

"He says he talks the other sort of thing--the dope--the fake
stuff--just as the rest of the hustlers do. He says it's
necessary in order to keep the people fooled--that if they got
wise to the real way to succeed, then there'd be nobody to rob
and get rich off of. Oh, he's got it right. He's a smart one."

The sad, bitter expression was strong in Susan's face.

After a pause, Ida went on: "If a girl's an ignorant fool or
squeamish, she don't get up in this business any more than in
any other. But if she keeps a cool head, and don't take lovers
unless they pay their way, and don't drink, why she can keep
her self-respect and not have to take to the streets."

Susan lifted her head eagerly. "Don't have to take to the
streets?" she echoed.

"Certainly not," declared Ida. "I very seldom let a man pick
me up after dark--unless he looks mighty good. I go out in the
daytime. I pretend I'm an actress out of a job for the time
being, or a forelady in a big shop who's taking a day or so
off, or a respectable girl living with her parents. I put a
lot of money into clothes--quiet, ladylike clothes. Mighty
good investment. If you ain't got clothes in New York you
can't do any kind of business. I go where a nice class of men
hangs out, and I never act bold, but just flirt timidly, as so
many respectable girls or semi-respectables do. But when a
girl plays that game, she has to be careful not to make a man
think he ain't expected to pay. The town's choked full of men
on the lookout for what they call love--which means, for
something cheap or, better still, free. Men are just crazy
about themselves. Nothing easier than to fool 'em--and
nothing's harder than to make 'em think you ain't stuck on 'em.
I tell you, a girl in our life has a chance to learn men. They
turn themselves inside out to us."

Susan, silent, her thoughts flowing like a mill race, helped
Ida with the dishes. Then they dressed and went together for
a walk. It being Sunday evening, the streets were quiet. They
sauntered up Fifth Avenue as far as Fifty-ninth Street and
back. Ida's calm and sensible demeanor gave Susan much needed
courage every time a man spoke to them. None of these men
happened to be up to Ida's standard, which was high.

"No use wasting time on snide people," explained she. "We
don't want drinks and a gush of loose talk, and I saw at a
glance that was all those chappies were good for."

They returned home at half-past nine without adventure. Toward
midnight one of Ida's regulars called and Susan was free to go
to bed. She slept hardly at all. Ever before her mind hovered
a nameless, shapeless horror. And when she slept she dreamed
of her wedding night, woke herself screaming, "Please, Mr.
Ferguson--please!"

Ida had three chief sources of revenue.

The best was five men--her "regular gentleman friends"--who
called by appointment from time to time. These paid her ten
dollars apiece, and occasionally gave her presents of money or
jewelry--nothing that amounted to much. From them she averaged
about thirty-five dollars a week. Her second source was a Mrs.
Thurston who kept in West Fifty-sixth Street near Ninth Avenue
a furnished-room house of the sort that is on the official--and
also the "revenue"--lists of the police and the anti-vice
societies. This lady had a list of girls and married women
upon whom she could call. Gentlemen using her house for
rendezvous were sometimes disappointed by the ladies with whom
they were intriguing. Again a gentleman grew a little weary of
his perhaps too respectable or too sincerely loving ladylove
and appealed to Mrs. Thurston. She kept her list of availables
most select and passed them off as women of good position
willing to supplement a small income, or to punish stingy
husbands or fathers and at the same time get the money they
needed for dress and bridge, for matinees and lunches. Mrs.
Thurston insisted--and Ida was inclined to believe--that there
were genuine cases of this kind on the list.

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

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

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

She deceived the "regulars" without taking the trouble to
remember her deceptions. They caught her lying so often that
she knew they thought her untruthful through and through. But
this only gave her an opportunity for additional pleasure--the
pleasure of inventing lies that they would believe in spite of
their distrust of her. "Anyhow," said she, "haven't you
noticed the liars everybody's on to are always believed and
truthful people are doubted?"

Upon the men with whom she flirted, she practiced the highly
colored romances it would have been useless to try upon the
regulars. Her greatest triumph at this game was a hard luck
story she had told so effectively that the man had given her
two hundred dollars. Most of her romances turned about her own
ruin. As a matter of fact, she had told Susan the exact truth
when she said she had taken up her mode of life deliberately;
she had grown weary and impatient of the increasing
poverty of a family which, like so many of the artisan and
small merchant and professional classes in this day of
concentrating wealth and spreading tastes for comfort and
luxury, was on its way down from comfort toward or through the
tenements. She was a type of the recruits that are swelling
the prostitute class in ever larger numbers and are driving the
prostitutes of the tenement class toward starvation--where they
once dominated the profession even to its highest ranks, even
to the fashionable _cocotes_ who prey upon the second generation
of the rich. But Ida never told her lovers her plain and
commonplace tale of yielding to the irresistible pressure of
economic forces. She had made men weep at her recital of her
wrongs. It had even brought her offers of marriage--none,
however, worth accepting.

"I'd be a boob to marry a man with less than fifteen or twenty
thousand a year, wouldn't I?" said she. "Why, two of the
married men who come to see me regularly give me more than they
give their wives for pin money. And in a few years I'll be
having my own respectable business, with ten thousand
income--maybe more--and as well thought of as the next woman."

Ida's dream was a house in the country, a fine flat in town, a
husband in some "refined" profession and children at high-class
schools. "And I'll get there, don't you doubt it!" exclaimed
she. "Others have--of course, you don't know about
them--they've looked out for that. Yes, lots of others
have--but--well, just you watch your sister Ida."

And Susan felt that she would indeed arrive. Already she had
seen that there was no difficulty such as she had once imagined
about recrossing the line to respectability. The only real
problem in that matter was how to get together enough to make
the crossing worth while--for what was there in respectability
without money, in a day when respectability had ceased to mean
anything but money?

Ida wished to take her to Mrs. Thurston and get her a favored
place on the list. Susan thanked her, but said, "Not yet--not
quite yet." Ida suggested that they go out together as two
young married women whose husbands had gone on the road. Susan
put her off from day to day. Ida finally offered to introduce
her to one of the regulars: "He's a nice fellow--knows how to
treat a lady in a gentlemanly way. Not a bit coarse or
familiar." Susan would not permit this generosity. And all
this time her funds were sinking. She had paid a second week's
rent, had bought cooking apparatus, some food supplies, some
necessary clothing. She was down to a five-dollar bill and a
little change.

"Look here, Lorna," said Ida, between remonstrance and
exasperation, "when _are_ you going to start in?"

Susan looked fixedly at her, said with a slow smile, "When I
can't hold out another minute."

Ida tossed her head angrily. "You've got brains--more than I
have," she cried. "You've got every advantage for catching
rich men--even a rich husband. You're educated. You speak and
act and look refined. Why you could pretend to be a howling
fashionable swell. You've got all the points. But what have
you got 'em for? Not to use that's certain."

"You can't be as disgusted with me as I am."

"If you're going to do a thing, why, _do_ it!"

"That's what I tell myself. But--I can't make a move."

Ida gave a gesture of despair. "I don't see what's to become
of you. And you could do _so_ well! . . . Let me phone Mr.
Sterling. I told him about you. He's anxious to meet you.
He's fond of books--like you. You'd like him. He'd give up a
lot to you, because you're classier than I am."

Susan threw her arms round Ida and kissed her. "Don't bother
about me," she said. "I've got to act in my own foolish,
stupid way. I'm like a child going to school. I've got to
learn a certain amount before I'm ready to do whatever it is
I'm going to do. And until I learn it, I can't do much of
anything. I thought I had learned in the last few months. I
see I haven't."

"Do listen to sense, Lorna," pleaded Ida. "If you wait till
the last minute, you'll get left. The time to get the money's
when you have money. And I've a feeling that you're not
particularly flush."

"I'll do the best I can. And I can't move till I'm ready."

Meanwhile she continued to search for work--work that would
enable her to live _decently_, wages less degrading than the
wages of shame. In a newspaper she read an advertisement of a
theatrical agency. Advertisements of all kinds read well;
those of theatrical agencies read--like the fairy tales that
they were. However, she found in this particular offering of
dazzling careers and salaries a peculiar phrasing that decided
her to break the rule she had made after having investigated
scores of this sort of offers.

Rod was abroad; anyhow, enough time had elapsed. One of the
most impressive features of the effect of New York--meaning by
"New York" only that small but significant portion of the four
millions that thinks--at least, after a fashion, and acts,
instead of being mere passive tools of whatever happens to turn
up--the most familiar notable effect of this New York is the
speedy distinction in the newcomer of those illusions and
delusions about life and about human nature, about good and
evil, that are for so many people the most precious and the
only endurable and beautiful thing in the world. New York,
destroyer of delusions and cherished hypocrisies and pretenses,
therefore makes the broadly intelligent of its citizens hardy,
makes the others hard--and between the hardy and hard, between
sense and cynicism, yawns a gulf like that between Absalom and
Dives. Susan, a New Yorker now, had got the habit--in thought,
at least--of seeing things with somewhat less distortion from
the actual. She no longer exaggerated the importance of the
Rod-Susan episode. She saw that in New York, where life is
crowded with events, everything in one's life, except death,
becomes incident, becomes episode, where in regions offering
less to think about each rare happening took on an aspect of
vast importance. The Rod-Susan love adventure, she now saw,
was not what it would have seemed--therefore, would have
been--in Sutherland, but was mere episode of a New York life,
giving its light and shade to a certain small part of the long,
variedly patterned fabric of her life, and of his, not
determining the whole. She saw that it was simply like a bend
in the river, giving a new turn to current and course but not
changing the river itself, and soon left far behind and
succeeded by other bends giving each its equal or greater turn
to the stream.

Rod had passed from her life, and she from his life. Thus she
was free to begin her real career--the stage--if she could. She
went to the suite of offices tenanted by Mr. Josiah Ransome.
She was ushered in to Ransome himself, instead of halting with
underlings. She owed this favor to advantages which her lack
of vanity and of self-consciousness prevented her from
surmising. Ransome--smooth, curly, comfortable
looking--received her with a delicate blending of the paternal
and the gallant. After he had inspected her exterior with
flattering attentiveness and had investigated her
qualifications with a thoroughness that was convincing of
sincerity he said:

"Most satisfactory! I can make you an exceptional assurance.
If you register with me, I can guarantee you not less than
twenty-five a week."

Susan hesitated long and asked many questions before she
finally--with reluctance paid the five dollars. She felt
ashamed of her distrust, but might perhaps have persisted in it
had not Mr. Ransome said:

"I don't blame you for hesitating, my dear young lady. And if
I could I'd put you on my list without payment. But you can
see how unbusinesslike that would be. I am a substantial,
old-established concern. You--no doubt you are perfectly
reliable. But I have been fooled so many times. I must not
let myself forget that after all I know nothing about you."

As soon as Susan had paid he gave her a list of vaudeville and
musical comedy houses where girls were wanted. "You can't fail
to suit one of them," said he. "If not, come back here and get
your money."

After two weary days of canvassing she went back to Ransome.
He was just leaving. But he smiled genially, opened his desk
and seated himself. "At your service," said he. "What luck?"

"None," replied Susan. "I couldn't live on the wages they
offered at the musical comedy places, even if I could get placed."

"And the vaudeville people?"

"When I said I could only sing and not dance, they looked
discouraged. When I said I had no costumes they turned me down."

"Excellent!" cried Ransome. "You mustn't be so easily beaten.
You must take dancing lessons--perhaps a few singing lessons,
too. And you must get some costumes."

"But that means several hundred dollars."

"Three or four hundred," said Ransome airily. "A matter of a
few weeks."

"But I haven't anything like that," said Susan. "I haven't so
much as----"

"I comprehend perfectly," interrupted Ransome. She interested
him, this unusual looking girl, with her attractive mingling of
youth and experience. Her charm that tempted people to give
her at once the frankest confidences, moved him to go out of
his way to help her. "You haven't the money," he went on.

"You must have it. So--I promised to place you, and I will.
I don't usually go so far in assisting my clients. It's not
often necessary--and where it's necessary it's usually
imprudent. However--I'll give you the address of a flat where
there is a lady--a trustworthy, square sort, despite her--her
profession. She will put you in the way of getting on a sound
financial basis."

Ransome spoke in a matter-of-fact tone, like a man stating a
simple business proposition. Susan understood. She rose. Her
expression was neither shock nor indignation; but it was none
the less a negative.

"It's the regular thing, my dear," urged Ransome. "To make a
start, to get in right, you can't afford to be squeamish. The
way I suggest is the simplest and most direct of several that
all involve the same thing. And the surest. You look
steady-headed--self-reliant. You look sensible----"

Susan smiled rather forlornly. "But I'm not," said she. "Not yet."

Ransome regarded her with a sympathy which she felt was
genuine. "I'm sorry, my dear. I've done the best I can for
you. You may think it a very poor best--and it is. But"--he
shrugged his shoulders--"I didn't make this world and its
conditions for living. I may say also that I'm not the
responsible party--the party in charge. However----"

To her amazement he held out a five-dollar bill. "Here's your
fee back." He laughed at her expression. "Oh, I'm not a
robber," said he. "I only wish I could serve you. I didn't
think you were so--" his eyes twinkled--"so unreasonable, let
us say. Among those who don't know anything about life there's
an impression that my sort of people are in the business of
dragging women down. Perhaps one of us occasionally does as
bad--about a millionth part as bad--as the average employer of
labor who skims his profits from the lifeblood of his
employees. But as a rule we folks merely take those that are
falling and help them to light easy--or even to get up again."

Susan felt ashamed to take her money. But he pressed it on
her. "You'll need it," said he. "I know how it is with a girl
alone and trying to get a start. Perhaps later on you'll be
more in the mood where I can help you."

"Perhaps," said Susan.

"But I hope not. It'll take uncommon luck to pull you
through--and I hope you'll have it."

"Thank you," said Susan. He took her hand, pressed it
friendlily--and she felt that he was a man with real good in
him, more good than many who would have shrunk from him in horror.

She was waiting for a thrust from fate. But fate,
disappointing as usual, would not thrust. It seemed bent on
the malicious pleasure of compelling her to degrade herself
deliberately and with calculation, like a woman marrying for
support a man who refuses to permit her to decorate with any
artificial floral concealments of faked-up sentiment the sordid
truth as to what she is about. She searched within herself in
vain for the scruple or sentiment or timidity or whatever it
was that held her back from the course that was plainly
inevitable. She had got down to the naked fundamentals of
decency and indecency that are deep hidden by, and for most of
us under, hypocrisies of conventionality. She had found out
that a decent woman was one who respected her body and her
soul, that an indecent woman was one who did not, and that
marriage rites or the absence of them, the absence of financial
or equivalent consideration, or its presence, or its extent or
its form, were all irrelevant non-essentials. Yet--she
hesitated, knowing the while that she was risking a greater
degradation, and a stupid and fatal folly to boot, by shrinking
from the best course open to her--unless it were better to take
a dose of poison and end it all. She probably would have done
that had she not been so utterly healthy, therefore overflowing
with passionate love of life. Except in fiction suicide and
health do not go together, however superhumanly sensitive the
sore beset hero or heroine. Susan was sensitive enough;
whenever she did things incompatible with our false and
hypocritical and unscientific notions of sensitiveness,
allowances should be made for her because of her superb and
dauntless health. If her physical condition had been morbid,
her conduct might have been, would have been, very different.

She was still hesitating when Saturday night came round
again--swiftly despite long disheartening days, and wakeful
awful nights. In the morning her rent would be due. She had
a dollar and forty-five cents.

After dinner alone a pretense at dinner--she wandered the
streets of the old Tenderloin until midnight. An icy rain was
falling. Rains such as this--any rains except showers--were
rare in the City of the Sun. That rain by itself was enough to
make her downhearted. She walked with head down and umbrella
close to her shoulders. No one spoke to her. She returned
dripping; she had all but ruined her one dress. She went to
bed, but not to sleep. About nine--early for that house she
rose, drank a cup of coffee and ate part of a roll. Her little
stove and such other things as could not be taken along she
rolled into a bundle, marked it, "For Ida." On a scrap of
paper she wrote this note:

Don't think I'm ungrateful, please. I'm going without saying
good-by because I'm afraid if I saw you, you'd be generous
enough to put up for me, and I'd be weak enough to accept. And
if I did that, I'd never be able to get strong or even to hold
my head up. So--good-by. I'll learn sooner or later--learn
how to live. I hope it won't be too long--and that the teacher
won't be too hard on me.

Yes, I'll learn, and I'll buy fine hats at your grand millinery
store yet. Don't forget me altogether.

She tucked this note into the bundle and laid it against the
door behind which Ida and one of her regulars were sleeping
peacefully. The odor of Ida's powerful perfume came through
the cracks in the door; Susan drew it eagerly into her
nostrils, sobbed softly, turned away, It was one of the
perfumes classed as immoral; to Susan it was the aroma of a
friendship as noble, as disinterested, as generous, as human
sympathy had ever breathed upon human woe. With her few
personal possessions in a package she descended the stairs
unnoticed, went out into the rain. At the corner of Sixth
Avenue she paused, looked up and down the street. It was
almost deserted. Now and then a streetwalker, roused early by
a lover with perhaps a family waiting for him, hurried by,
looking piteous in the daylight which showed up false and dyed
hair, the layers of paint, the sad tawdriness of battered
finery from the cheapest bargain troughs.

Susan went slowly up Sixth Avenue. Two blocks, and she saw a
girl enter the side door of a saloon across the way. She
crossed the street, pushed in at the same door, went on to a
small sitting-room with blinds drawn, with round tables, on
every table a match stand. It was one of those places where
streetwalkers rest their weary legs between strolls, and sit
for company on rainy or snowy nights, and take shy men for
sociability-breeding drinks and for the preliminary bargaining.
The air of the room was strong with stale liquor and tobacco,
the lingering aroma of the night's vanished revels. In the far
corner sat the girl she had followed; a glass of raw whiskey
and another of water stood on the table before her. Susan
seated herself near the door and when the swollen-faced, surly
bartender came, ordered whiskey. She poured herself a
drink--filled the glass to the brim. She drank it in two
gulps, set the empty glass down. She shivered like an animal
as it is hit in the head with a poleax. The mechanism of life
staggered, hesitated, went on with a sudden leaping
acceleration of pace. Susan tapped her glass against the
matchstand. The bartender came.

"Another," said she.

The man stared at her. "The--hell!" he ejaculated. "You must be
afraid o' catchin' cold. Or maybe you're looking for the menagerie?"

Susan laughed and so did the girl in the corner. "Won't you
have a drink with me?" asked Susan.

"That's very kind of you," replied the girl, in the manner of
one eager to show that she, too, is a perfect lady in every
respect, used to the ways of the best society. She moved to a
chair at Susan's table.

She and Susan inventoried each other. Susan saw a mere
child--hardly eighteen--possibly not seventeen--but much worn
by drink and irregular living--evidently one of those who rush
into the fast woman's life with the idea that it is a career of
gayety--and do not find out their error until looks and health
are gone. Susan drank her second drink in three gulps, several
minutes apart. The girl was explaining in a thin, common
voice, childish yet cracked, that she had come there seeking a
certain lady friend because she had an extra man and needed a
side partner.

"Suppose you come with me," she suggested. "It's good money,
I think. Want to get next?"

"When I've had another drink," said Susan. Her eyes were
gorgeously brilliant. She had felt almost as reckless several
times before; but never had she felt this devil-may-care
eagerness to see what the turn of the next card would bring.
"You'll take one?"

"Sure. I feel like the devil. Been bumming round all night.
My lady friend that I had with me--a regular lady friend--she
was suddenly took ill. Appendicitis complicated with d.t.'s
the ambulance guy said. The boys are waiting for me to come
back, so's we can go on. They've got some swell rooms in a
hotel up in Forty-second Street. Let's get a move on."

The bartender served the third drink and Susan paid for them,
the other girl insisting on paying for the one she was having
when Susan came. Susan's head was whirling. Her spirits were
spiraling up and up. Her pale lips were wreathed in a reckless
smile. She felt courageous for adventure--any adventure. Her
capital had now sunk to three quarters and a five-cent piece.
They issued forth, talking without saying anything, laughing
without knowing or caring why. Life was a joke--a coarse, broad
joke--but amusing if one drank enough to blunt any refinement of
sensibility. And what was sensibility but a kind of snobbishness?
And what more absurd than snobbishness in an outcast?

"That's good whiskey they had, back there," said Susan.

"Good? Yes--if you don't care what you say."

"If you don't want to care what you say or do," explained Susan.

"Oh, all booze is good for that," said the girl. VI

THEY went through to Broadway and there stood waiting for a
car, each under her own umbrella. "Holy Gee!" cried Susan's
new acquaintance. "Ain't this rain a soaker?"

It was coming in sheets, bent and torn and driven horizontally
by the wind. The umbrella, sheltering the head somewhat, gave
a wholly false impression of protection. Both girls were soon
sopping wet. But they were more than cheerful about it; the
whiskey made them indifferent to external ills as they warmed
themselves by its bright fire. At that time a famous and much
envied, admired and respected "captain of industry," having
looted the street-car systems, was preparing to loot them over
again by the familiar trickery of the receivership and the
reorganization. The masses of the people were too ignorant to
know what was going on; the classes were too busy, each man of
each of them, about his own personal schemes for graft of one
kind and another. Thus, the street-car service was a joke and
a disgrace. However, after four or five minutes a north-bound
car appeared.

"But it won't stop," cried Susan. "It's jammed."

"That's why it will stop," replied her new acquaintance. "You
don't suppose a New York conductor'd miss a chance to put his
passengers more on the bum than ever?"

She was right, at least as to the main point; and the conductor
with much free handling of their waists and shoulders added
them to the dripping, straining press of passengers, enduring
the discomforts the captain of industry put upon them with more
patience than cattle would have exhibited in like
circumstances. All the way up Broadway the new acquaintance
enlivened herself and Susan and the men they were squeezed in
among by her loud gay sallies which her young prettiness made
seem witty. And certainly she did have an amazing and amusing
acquaintance with the slang at the moment current. The worn
look had vanished, her rounded girlhood freshness had returned.
As for Susan, you would hardly have recognized her as the same
person who had issued from the house in Twenty-ninth Street
less than an hour before. Indeed, it was not the same person.
Drink nervifies every character; here it transformed,
suppressing the characteristics that seemed, perhaps were,
essential in her normal state, and causing to bloom in sudden
audacity of color and form the passions and gayeties at other
times subdued by her intelligence and her sensitiveness. Her
brilliant glance moved about the car full as boldly as her
companion's. But there was this difference: Her companion
gazed straight into the eyes of the men; Susan's glance shot
past above or just below their eyes.

As they left the car at Forty-second Street the other girl gave
her short skirt a dexterous upward flirt that exhibited her
legs almost to the hips. Susan saw that they were well shaped
legs, surprisingly plump from the calves upward, considering
the slightness of her figure above the waist.

"I always do that when I leave a car," said the girl.
"Sometimes it starts something on the trail. You forgot your
package--back in the saloon!"

"Then I didn't forget much," laughed Susan. It appealed to
her, the idea of entering the new life empty-handed.

The hotel was one that must have been of the first class in its
day--not a distant day, for the expansion of New York in
craving for showy luxury has been as sudden as the miraculous
upward thrust of a steel skyscraper. It had now sunk to
relying upon the trade of those who came in off Broadway for a
few minutes. It was dingy and dirty; the walls and plastering
were peeling; the servants were slovenly and fresh. The girl
nodded to the evil-looking man behind the desk, who said:

"Hello, Miss Maud. Just in time. The boys were sending out
for some others."

"They've got a nerve!" laughed Maud. And she led Susan down a
rather long corridor to a door with the letter B upon it. Maud
explained: "This is the swellest suite in the house parlor,
bedroom, bath." She flung open the door, disclosing a
sitting-room in disorder with two young men partly dressed,
seated at a small table on which were bottles, siphons,
matches, remains of sandwiches, boxes of cigarettes--a chaotic
jumble of implements to dissipation giving forth a powerful,
stale odor. Maud burst into a stream of picturesque profanity
which set the two men to laughing. Susan had paused on the
threshold. The shock of this scene had for the moment arrested the
triumphant march of the alcohol through blood and nerve and brain.

"Oh, bite it off!" cried the darker of the two men to Maud,
"and have a drink. Ain't you ashamed to speak so free before
your innocent young lady friend?" He grinned at Susan. "What
Sunday school do you hail from?" inquired he.

The other young man was also looking at Susan; and it was an
arresting and somewhat compelling gaze. She saw that he was
tall and well set up. As he was dressed only in trousers and
a pale blue silk undershirt, the strength of his shoulders,
back and arms was in full evidence. His figure was like that
of the wonderful young prize-fighters she had admired at moving
picture shows to which Drumley had taken her. He had a
singularly handsome face, blond yet remotely suggesting
Italian. He smiled at Susan and she thought she had never seen
teeth more beautiful--pearl-white, regular, even. His eyes
were large and sensuous; smiling though they were, Susan was
ill at ease--for in them there shone the same untamed,
uncontrolled ferocity that one sees in the eyes of a wild
beast. His youth, his good looks, his charm made the sinister
savagery hinted in the smile the more disconcerting. He poured
whiskey from a bottle into each of the two tall glasses, filled
them up with seltzer, extended one toward Susan.

"Shut the door, Queenie," he said to her in a pleasant tone that
subtly mingled mockery and admiration. "And let's drink to love."

"Didn't I do well for you, Freddie?" cried Maud.

"She's my long-sought affinity," declared Freddie with the same
attractive mingling of jest and flattery.

Susan closed the door, accepted the glass, laughed into his
eyes. The whiskey was once more asserting its power. She took
about half the drink before she set the glass down.

The young man said, "Your name's Queenie, mine's Freddie." He
came to her, holding her gaze fast by the piercing look from
his handsome eyes. He put his arms round her and kissed her
full upon the pale, laughing lips. His eyes were still smiling
in pleasant mockery; yet his kiss burned and stung, and the
grip of his arm round her shoulders made her vaguely afraid.
Her smile died away. The grave, searching, wondering
expression reappeared in the violet-gray eyes for a moment.

"You're all right," said he. "Except those pale lips. You're
going to be my girl. That means, if you ever try to get away
from me unless I let you go--I'll kill you--or worse." And he
laughed as if he had made the best joke in the world. But she
saw in his eyes a sparkle that seemed to her to have something
of the malignance of the angry serpent's.

She hastily finished her drink.

Maud was jerking off her clothes, crying, "I want to get out of
these nasty wet rags." The steam heat was full on; the
sitting-room, the whole suite, was intensely warm. Maud hung
her skirt over the back of a chair close to the radiator, took
off her shoes and stockings and put them to dry also. In her
chemise she curled herself on a chair, lit a cigarette and
poured a drink. Her feet were not bad, but neither were they
notably good; she tucked them out of sight. She looked at
Susan. "Get off those wet things," urged she, "or you'll take
your death."

"In a minute," said Susan, but not convincingly.

Freddie forced another drink and a cigarette upon her. As a
girl at home in Sutherland, she had several times--she and
Ruth--smoked cigarettes in secrecy, to try the new London and
New York fashion, announced in the newspapers and the novels.
So the cigarette did not make her uncomfortable. "Look at the
way she's holding it?" cried Maud, and she and the men burst
out laughing. Susan laughed also and, Freddie helping,
practiced a less inexpert manner. Jim, the dark young man with
the sullen heavy countenance, rang for more sandwiches and another
bottle of whiskey. Susan continued to drink but ate nothing.

"Have a sandwich," said Freddie.

"I'm not hungry."

"Well, they say that to eat and drink means to die of paresis,
while to only drink means dying of delirium tremens. I guess
you're right. I'd prefer the d.t.'s. It's quicker and livelier."

Jim sang a ribald song with some amusing comedy business. Maud
told several stories whose only claim to point lay in their
frankness about things not usually spoken. "Don't you tell any
more, Maudie," advised Freddie. "Why is it that a woman never
takes up a story until every man on earth has heard it at least
twice?" The sandwiches disappeared, the second bottle of
whiskey ran low. Maud told story after story of how she had
played this man and that for a sucker--was as full of such tales
and as joyous and self-pleased over them as an honest salesman
telling his delighted, respectable, pew-holding employer how he
has "stuck" this customer and that for a "fancy" price.
Presently Maud again noticed that Susan was in her wet clothes
and cried out about it. Susan pretended to start to undress.
Freddie and Jim suddenly seized her. She struggled, half
laughing; the whiskey was sending into her brain dizzying
clouds. She struggled more fiercely. But it was in vain.

"Gee, you _have_ got a prize, Freddie!" exclaimed Jim at last,
angry. "A regular tartar!"

"A damn handsome one," retorted Freddie. "She's even got feet."

Susan, amid the laughter of the others, darted for the bedroom.
Cowering in a corner, trying to cover herself, she ordered
Freddie to leave her. He laughed, seized her in his iron grip.
She struck at him, bit him in the shoulder. He gave a cry of
pain and drove a savage blow into her cheek. Then he buried
his fingers in her throat and the gleam of his eyes made her
soul quail.

"Don't kill me!" she cried, in the clutch of cowardice for the
first time. It was not death that she feared but the phantom
of things worse than death that can be conjured to the
imagination by the fury of a personality which is utterly
reckless and utterly cruel. "Don't kill me!" she shrieked.
"What the hell are you doing?" shouted Jim from the other room.

"Shut that door," replied Freddie. "I'm going to attend to my
lady friend."

As the door slammed, he dragged Susan by the throat and one arm
to the bed, flung her down. "I saw you were a high stepper the
minute I looked at you," said he, in a pleasant, cooing voice
that sent the chills up and down her spine. "I knew you'd have
to be broke. Well, the sooner it's done, the sooner we'll get
along nicely." His blue eyes were laughing into hers. With
the utmost deliberation he gripped her throat with one hand and
with the other began to slap her, each blow at his full
strength. Her attempts to scream were only gasps. Quickly the
agony of his brutality drove her into unconsciousness. Long
after she had ceased to feel pain, she continued to feel the
impact of those blows, and dully heard her own deep groans.

When she came to her senses, she was lying sprawled upon the
far side of the bed. Her head was aching wildly; her body was
stiff and sore; her face felt as if it were swollen to many
times its normal size. In misery she dragged herself up and
stood on the floor. She went to the bureau and stared at
herself in the glass. Her face was indeed swollen, but not to
actual disfigurement. Under her left eye there was a small cut
from which the blood had oozed to smear and dry upon her left
cheek. Upon her throat were faint bluish finger marks. The
damage was not nearly so great as her throbbing nerves
reported--the damage to her body. But--her soul--it was a
crushed, trampled, degraded thing, lying prone and bleeding to
death. "Shall I kill myself?" she thought. And the answer
came in a fierce protest and refusal from every nerve of her
intensely vital youth. She looked straight into her own
eyes--without horror, without shame, without fear. "You are as
low as the lowest," she said to her image--not to herself but
to her image; for herself seemed spectator merely of that body
and soul aching and bleeding and degraded.

It was the beginning of self-consciousness with her--a curious
kind of self-consciousness--her real self, aloof and far
removed, observing calmly, critically, impersonally the
adventures of her body and the rest of her surface self.

She turned round to look again at the man who had outraged
them. His eyes were open and he was gazing dreamily at her, as
smiling and innocent as a child. When their eyes met, his
smile broadened until he was showing his beautiful teeth. "You
_are_ a beauty!" said he. "Go into the other room and get me a
cigarette."

She continued to look fixedly at him.

Without change of expression he said gently, "Do you want
another lesson in manners?"

She went to the door, opened it, entered the sitting-room. The
other two had pulled open a folding bed and were lying in it,
Jim's head on Maud's bosom, her arms round his neck. Both were
asleep. His black beard had grown out enough to give his face
a dirty and devilish expression. Maud looked far more youthful
and much prettier than when she was awake. Susan put a
cigarette between her lips, lit it, carried a box of cigarettes
and a stand of matches in to Freddie.

"Light one for me," said he.

She obeyed, held it to his lips.

"Kiss me, first."

Her pale lips compressed.

"Kiss me," he repeated, far down in his eyes the vicious gleam
of that boundlessly ferocious cruelty which is mothered not by
rage but by pleasure.

She kissed him on the cheek.

"On the lips," he commanded.

Their lips met, and it was to her as if a hot flame, terrible
yet thrilling, swept round and embraced her whole body.

"Do you love me?" he asked tenderly.

She was silent.

"You love me?" he asked commandingly.

"You can call it that if you like."

"I knew you would. I understand women. The way to make a
woman love is to make her afraid."

She gazed at him. "I am not afraid," she said.

He laughed. "Oh, yes. That's why you do what I say--and
always will."

"No," replied she. "I don't do it because I am afraid, but
because I want to live."

"I should think! . . . You'll be all right in a day or so,"
said he, after inspecting her bruises. "Now, I'll explain to
you what good friends we're going to be."

He propped himself in an attitude of lazy grace, puffed at his
cigarette in silence for a moment, as if arranging what he had
to say. At last he began:

"I haven't any regular business. I wasn't born to work. Only
damn fools work--and the clever man waits till they've got
something, then he takes it away from 'em. You don't want to
work, either."

"I haven't been able to make a living at it," said the girl.
She was sitting cross-legged, a cover draped around her.

"You're too pretty and too clever. Besides, as you say, you
couldn't make a living at it--not what's a living for a woman
brought up as you've been. No, you can't work. So we're going
to be partners."

"No," said Susan. "I'm going to dress now and go away."

Freddie laughed. "Don't be a fool. Didn't I say we were to be
partners? . . . You want to keep on at the sporting business,
don't you?"

Hers was the silence of assent.

"Well--a woman--especially a young one like you--is no good unless
she has someone--some man--behind her. Married or single,
respectable or lively, working or sporting--N. G. without a
man. A woman alone doesn't amount to any more than a rich
man's son."

There had been nothing in Susan's experience to enable her to
dispute this.

"Now, I'm going to stand behind you. I'll see that you don't
get pinched, and get you out if you do. I'll see that you get
the best the city's got if you're sick--and so on. I've got a
pull with the organization. I'm one of Finnegan's lieutenants.
Some day--when I'm older and have served my apprenticeship--I'll
pull off something good. Meanwhile--I manage to live. I always
have managed it--and I never did a stroke of real work since I
was a kid--and never shall. God was mighty good to me when he
put a few brains in this nut of mine."

He settled his head comfortably in the pillow and smiled at his
own thoughts. In spite of herself Susan had been not only
interested but attracted. It is impossible for any human being
to contemplate mystery in any form without being fascinated.
And here was the profoundest mystery she had ever seen. He
talked well, and his mode of talking was that of education, of
refinement even. An extraordinary man, certainly--and in what
a strange way!

"Yes," said he presently, looking at her with his gentle,
friendly smile. "We'll be partners. I'll protect you and
we'll divide what you make."

What a strange creature! Had he--this kindly handsome
youth--done that frightful thing? No--no. It was another
instance of the unreality of the outward life. _He_ had not
done it, any more than she--her real self--had suffered it. Her
reply to his restatement of the partnership was:

"No, thank you. I want nothing to do with it."

"You're dead slow," said he, with mild and patient persuasion.
"How would you get along at your business in this town if you
didn't have a backer? Why, you'd be taking turns at the Island
and the gutter within six months. You'd be giving all your
money to some rotten cop or fly cop who couldn't protect you,
at that. Or you'd work the street for some cheap cadet who'd
beat you up oftener than he'd beat up the men who welched on you."

"I'll look out for myself," persisted she.

"Bless the baby!" exclaimed he, immensely amused. "How lucky
that you found me! I'm going to take care of you in spite of
yourself. Not for nothing, of course. You wouldn't value me
if you got me for nothing. I'm going to help you, and you're
going to help me. You need me, and I need you. Why do you
suppose I took the trouble to tame you? What _you_ want doesn't
go. It's what __I__ want."

He let her reflect on this a while. Then he went on:

"You don't understand about fellows like Jim and me--though
Jim's a small potato beside me, as you'll soon find out.
Suppose you didn't obey orders--just as I do what Finnegan
tells me--just as Finnegan does what the big shout down below
says? Suppose you didn't obey--what then?"

"I don't know," confessed Susan.

"Well, it's time you learned. We'll say, you act stubborn.
You dress and say good-by to me and start out. Do you think
I'm wicked enough to let you make a fool of yourself? Well,
I'm not. You won't get outside the door before your good angel
here will get busy. I'll be telephoning to a fly cop of this
district. And what'll he do? Why, about the time you are
halfway down the block, he'll pinch you. He'll take you to the
station house. And in Police Court tomorrow the Judge'll give
you a week on the Island for being a streetwalker."

Susan shivered. She instinctively glanced toward the window.
The rain was still falling, changing the City of the Sun into
a city of desolation. It looked as though it would never see
the sun again--and her life looked that way, also.

Freddie was smiling pleasantly. He went on:

"You do your little stretch on the Island. When your time's up
I send you word where to report to me. We'll say you don't
come. The minute you set foot on the streets again alone, back
to the Island you go. . . . Now, do you understand,
Queenie?" And he laughed and pulled her over and kissed her and
smoothed her hair. "You're a very superior article--you are,"
he murmured. "I'm stuck on you."

Susan did not resist. She did not care what happened to her.
The more intelligent a trapped animal is, the less resistance
it offers, once it realizes. Helpless--absolutely helpless.
No money--no friends. No escape but death. The sun was
shining. Outside lay the vast world; across the street on a
flagpole fluttered the banner of freedom. Freedom! Was there
any such thing anywhere? Perhaps if one had plenty of
money--or powerful friends. But not for her, any more than for
the masses whose fate of squalid and stupid slavery she was
trying to escape. Not for her; so long as she was helpless she
would simply move from one land of slavery to another. Helpless!
To struggle would not be courageous, but merely absurd.

"If you don't believe me, ask Maud," said Freddie. "I don't
want you to get into trouble. As I told you, I'm stuck on
you." With his cigarette gracefully loose between those almost
too beautifully formed lips of his and with one of his strong
smooth white arms about his head, he looked at her, an
expression of content with himself, of admiration for her in
his handsome eyes. "You don't realize your good luck. But
you will when you find how many girls are crazy to get on the
good side of me. This is a great old town, and nobody amounts
to anything in it unless he's got a pull or is next to somebody
else that has."

Susan's slow reflective nod showed that this statement
explained, or seemed to explain, certain mysteries of life that
had been puzzling her.

"You've got a lot in you," continued he. "That's my opinion,
and I'm a fair judge of yearlings. You're liable to land
somewhere some day when you've struck your gait. . . . If
I had the mon I'd be tempted to set you up in a flat and keep
you all to myself. But I can't afford it. It takes a lot of
cash to keep me going. . . . You'll do well. You won't
have to bother with any but classy gents. I'll see that the
cops put you wise when there's anyone round throwing his money
away. And I can help you, myself. I've got quite a line of
friends among the rich chappies from Fifth Avenue. And I
always let my girls get the benefit of it."

My girls! Susan's mind, recovering now from its daze, seized
upon this phrase. And soon she had fathomed how these two
young men came to be so luxuriously dressed, so well supplied
with money. She had heard of this system under which the girls
in the streets were exploited as thoroughly as the girls in the
houses. In all the earth was there anyone who was suffered to
do for himself or herself without there being a powerful idle
someone else to take away all the proceeds but a bare living?
Helpless! Helpless!

"How many girls have you?" she asked.

"Jealous already!" And he laughed and blew a cloud of smoke
into her face.

She took the quarters he directed--a plain clean room two
flights up at seven dollars a week, in a furnished room house
on West Forty-third Street near Eighth Avenue. She was but a
few blocks from where she and Rod had lived. New York--to a
degree unrivaled among the cities of the world--illustrates in
the isolated lives of its never isolated inhabitants how little
relationship there is between space and actualities of
distance. Wherever on earth there are as many as two human
beings, one may see an instance of the truth. That an infinity
of spiritual solitude can stretch uncrossable even between two
locked in each other's loving arms! But New York's solitudes,
its separations, extend to the surface things. Susan had no
sense of the apparent nearness of her former abode. Her life
again lay in the same streets; but there again came the sense
of strangeness which only one who has lived in New York could
appreciate. The streets were the same; but to her they seemed
as the streets of another city, because she was now seeing in
them none of the things she used to see, was seeing instead
kinds of people, aspects of human beings, modes of feeling and
acting and existing of which she used to have not the faintest
knowledge. There were as many worlds as kinds of people.
Thus, though we all talk to each other as if about the same
world, each of us is thinking of his own kind of world, the
only one he sees. And that is why there can never be sympathy
and understanding among the children of men until there is some
approach to resemblance in their various lots; for the lot
determines the man.

The house was filled with women of her own kind. They were
allowed all privileges. There was neither bath nor stationary
washstand, but the landlady supplied tin tubs on request. "Oh,
Mr. Palmer's recommendation," said she; "I'll give you two days
to pay. My terms are in advance. But Mr. Palmer's a dear
friend of mine."

She was a short woman with a monstrous bust and almost no hips.
Her thin hair was dyed and frizzled, and her voice sounded as
if it found its way out of her fat lips after a long struggle
to pass through the fat of her throat and chest. Her second
chin lay upon her bosom in a soft swollen bag that seemed to be
suspended from her ears. Her eyes were hard and evil, of a
brownish gray. She affected suavity and elaborate politeness;
but if the least thing disturbed her, she became red and coarse
of voice and vile of language. The vile language and the
nature of her business and her private life aside, she would
have compared favorably with anyone in the class of those who
deal--as merchants, as landlords, as boarding-house
keepers--with the desperately different classes of uncertain
income. She was reputed rich. They said she stayed on in
business to avoid lonesomeness and to keep in touch with all
that was going on in the life that had been hers from girlhood.

"And she's a mixer," said Maud to Susan. In response to
Susan's look of inquiry, she went on to explain, "A mixer's a
white woman that keeps a colored man." Maud laughed at Susan's
expression of horror. "You are a greenie," she mocked. "Why,
it's all the rage. Nearly all the girls do--from the
headliners that are kept by the young Fifth Avenue millionaires
down to nine out of ten of the girls of our set that you see in
Broadway. No, I'm not lying. It's the truth. __I__ don't do
it--at least, not yet. I may get round to it."

After the talk with Maud about the realities of life as it is
lived by several hundred thousand of the inhabitants of
Manhattan Island Susan had not the least disposition to test by
defiance the truth of Freddie Palmer's plain statement as to
his powers and her duties. He had told her to go to work that
very Sunday evening, and Jim had ordered Maud to call for her
and to initiate her. And at half-past seven Maud came. At
once she inspected Susan's swollen face.

"Might be a bit worse," she said. "With a veil on, no one'd
notice it."

"But I haven't a veil," said Susan.

"I've got mine with me--pinned to my garter. I haven't been
home since this afternoon." And Maud produced it.

"But I can't wear a veil at night," objected Susan.

"Why not?" said Maud. "Lots of the girls do. A veil's a dandy
hider. Besides, even where a girl's got nothing to hide and
has a face that's all to the good, still it's not a bad idea to
wear a veil. Men like what they can't see. One of the ugliest
girls I know makes a lot of money--all with her veil. She
fixes up her figure something grand. Then she puts on that
veil--one of the kind you think you can see a face through but
you really can't. And she never lifts it till the `come on'
has given up his cash. Then----" Maud laughed. "Gee, but she
has had some hot run-ins after she hoists her curtain!"

"Why don't you wear a veil all the time?" asked Susan.

Maud tossed her head. "What do you take me for? I've got too
good an opinion of my looks for that."

Susan put on the veil. It was not of the kind that is a
disguise. Still, diaphanous though it seemed, it concealed
astonishingly the swelling in Susan's face. Obviously, then,
it must at least haze the features, would do something toward
blurring the marks that go to make identity.

"I shall always wear a veil," said Susan.

"Oh, I don't know," deprecated Maud. "I think you're quite
pretty--though a little too proper and serious looking to suit
some tastes."

Susan had removed veil and hat, was letting down her hair.

"What are you doing that for?" cried Maud impatiently. "We're
late now and----"

"I don't like the way my hair's done," cried Susan.

"Why, it was all right--real swell--good as a hairdresser could
have done."

But Susan went on at her task. Ever since she came East she
had worn it in a braid looped at the back of her head. She
proceeded to change this radically. With Maud forgetting to be
impatient in admiration of her swift fingers she made a
coiffure much more elaborate--wide waves out from her temples
and a big round loose knot behind. She was well content with
the result--especially when she got the veil on again and it
was assisting in the change.

"What do you think?" she said to Maud when she was ready.

"My, but you look different!" exclaimed Maud. "A lot
dressier--and sportier. More--more Broadway."

"That's it--Broadway," said Susan. She had always avoided
looking like Broadway. Now, she would take the opposite tack.
Not loud toilets--for they would defeat her purpose. Not loud
but--just common.

"But," added Maud, "you do look swell about the feet. Where
_do_ you get your shoes? No, I guess it's the feet."

As they sallied forth Maud said, "First, I'll show you our
hotel." And they went to a Raines Law hotel in Forty-second
Street near Eighth Avenue. "The proprietor's a heeler of
Finnegan's. I guess Freddie comes in for some rake-off. He
gives us twenty-five cents of every dollar the man spends,"
explained she. "And if the man opens wine we get two dollars
on every bottle. The best way is to stay behind when the man
goes and collect right away. That avoids rows--though they'd
hardly dare cheat you, being as you're on Freddie's staff.
Freddie's got a big pull. He's way up at the top. I wish to
God I had him instead of Jim. Freddie's giving up fast. They
say he's got some things a lot better'n this now, and that he's
likely to quit this and turn respectable. You ought to treat
me mighty white, seeing what I done for you. I've put you in
right--and that's everything in this here life."

Susan looked all round--looked along the streets stretching
away with their morning suggestion of freedom to fly, freedom
to escape--helpless! "Can't I get a drink?" asked she. There
was a strained look in her eyes, a significant nervousness of
the lips and hands. "I must have a drink."

"Of course. Max has been on a vacation, but I hear he's back.
When I introduce you, he'll probably set 'em up. But I
wouldn't drink if I were you till I went off duty."

"I must have a drink," replied Susan.

"It'll get you down. It got me down. I used to have a fine
sucker--gave me a hundred a week and paid my flat rent. But I
had nothing else to do, so I took to drinking, and I got so
reckless that I let him catch me with my lover that time. But
I had to have somebOdy to spend the money on. Anyhow, it's no
fun having a John."

"A John?" said Susan. "What's that?"

"You are an innocent----!" laughed Maud. "A John's a sucker--a
fellow that keeps a girl. Well, it'd be no fun to have a John
unless you fooled him--would it?"

They now entered the side door of the hotel and ascended the
stairs. A dyspeptic looking man with a red nose that stood out
the more strongly for the sallowness of his skin and the
smallness of his sunken brown eyes had his hands spread upon
the office desk and was leaning on his stiff arms. "Hello,
Max," said Maud in a fresh, condescending way. "How's business?"

"Slow. Always slack on Sundays. How goes it with you, Maudie?"

"So--so. I manage to pick up a living in spite of the damn
chippies. I don't see why the hell they don't go into the
business regular and make something out of it, instead of
loving free. I'm down on a girl that's neither the one thing
nor the other. This is my lady friend, Miss Queenie." She
turned laughingly to Susan. "I never asked your last name."

"Brown."

"My, what a strange name!" cried Maud. Then, as the proprietor
laughed with the heartiness of tradesman at good customer's
jest, she said, "Going to set 'em up, Max?"

He pressed a button and rang a bell loudly. The responding
waiter departed with orders for a whiskey and two lithias.
Maud explained to Susan:

"Max used to be a prize-fighter. He was middleweight champion."

"I've been a lot of things in my days," said Max with pride.

"So I've heard," joked Maud. "They say they've got your
picture at headquarters."

"That's neither here nor there," said Max surlily. "Don't get
too flip." Susan drank her whiskey as soon as it came, and the
glow rushed to her ghastly face. Said Max with great politeness:

"You're having a little neuralgia, ain't you? I see your face
is swhole some."

"Yes," said Susan. "Neuralgia." Maud laughed hilariously.
Susan herself had ceased to brood over the incident. In
conventional lives, visited but rarely by perilous storms, by
disaster, such an event would be what is called concise. But
in life as it is lived by the masses of the people--life in
which awful disease, death, maiming, eviction, fire, violent
event of any and every kind, is part of the daily routine in
that life of the masses there is no time for lingering upon the
weathered storm or for bothering about and repairing its
ravages. Those who live the comparatively languid, the
sheltered life should not use their own standards of what is
delicate and refined, what is conspicuous and strong, when they
judge their fellow beings as differently situated.
Nevertheless, they do--with the result that we find the puny mud
lark criticizing the eagle battling with the hurricane.

When Susan and Maud were in the street again, Susan declared
that she must have another drink. "I can't offer to pay for
one for you," said she to Maud. "I've almost no money. And I
must spend what I've got for whiskey before I--can--can--start in."

Maud began to laugh, looked at Susan, and was almost crying
instead. "I can lend you a fiver," she said. "Life's
hell--ain't it? My father used to have a good
business--tobacco. The trust took it away from him--and then
he drank--and mother, she drank, too. And one day he beat her
so she died--and he ran away. Oh, it's all awful! But I've
stopped caring. I'm stuck on Jim--and another little fellow he
don't know about. For God's sake don't tell him or he'd have
me pinched for doing business free. I get full every night and
raise old Nick. Sometimes I hate Jim. I've tried to kill him
twice when I was loaded. But a girl's got to have a backer
with a pull. And Jim lets me keep a bigger share of what I
make than some fellows. Freddie's pretty good too, they
say--except when he's losing on the races or gets stuck on some
actress that's too classy to be shanghaied--like you was--and
that makes him cough up."

Maud went on to disclose that Jim usually let her have all she
made above thirty dollars a week, and in hard weeks had
sometimes let her beg off with fifteen. Said she:

"I can generally count on about fifteen or twenty for myself.
Us girls that has backers make a lot more money than the girls
that hasn't. They're always getting pinched too--though
they're careful never to speak first to a man. _We_ can go
right up and brace men with the cops looking on. A cop that'd
touch us would get broke--unless we got too gay or robbed
somebody with a pull. But none of our class of girls do any
robbing. There's nothing in it. You get caught sooner or
later, and then you're down and out."

While Susan was having two more drinks Maud talked about
Freddie. She seemed to know little about him, though he was
evidently one of the conspicuous figures. He had started in
the lower East Side--had been leader of one of those gangs that
infest tenement districts--the young men who refuse to submit
to the common lot of stupid and badly paid toil and try to
fight their way out by the quick methods of violence instead of
the slower but surer methods of robbing the poor through a
store of some kind. These gangs were thieves, blackmailers,
kidnapers of young girls for houses of prostitution, repeaters.
Most of them graduated into habitual jailbirds, a few--the
cleverest--became saloon-keepers and politicians and high-class
professional gamblers and race track men.

Freddie, Maud explained, was not much over twenty-five, yet was
already well up toward the place where successful gang leaders
crossed over into the respectable class--that is, grafted in
"big figures." He was a great reader, said Maud, and had taken
courses at some college. "They say he and his gang used to
kill somebody nearly every night. Then he got a lot of money
out of one of his jobs--some say it was a bank robbery and some
say they killed a miner who was drunk with a big roll on him.
Anyhow, Freddie got next to Finnegan--he's worth several
millions that he made out of policy shops and poolrooms, and
contracts and such political things. So he's in right--and he's
got the brains. He's a good one for working out schemes for
making people work hard and bring him their money. And
everybody's afraid of him because he won't stop at nothing and
is too slick to get caught."

Maud broke off abruptly and rose, warned by the glazed look in
Susan's eyes. Susan was so far gone that she had difficulty in
not staggering and did not dare speak lest her uncertain tongue
should betray her. Maud walked her up and down the block
several times to give the fresh air a chance, then led her up
to a man who had looked at them in passing and had paused to
look back. "Want to go have a good time, sweetheart?" said
Maud to the man. He was well dressed, middle-aged, with a full
beard and spectacles, looked as if he might be a banker, or
perhaps a professor in some college.

"How much?" asked he.

"Five for a little while. Come along, sporty. Take me or my
lady friend."

"How much for both of you?"

"Ten. We don't cut rates. Take us both, dearie. I know a
hotel where it'd be all right."

"No. I guess I'll take your lady friend." He had been peering
at Susan through his glasses. "And if she treats me well, I'll
take her again. You're sure you're all right? I'm a married man."

"We've both been home visiting for a month, and walking the
chalk. My, but ma's strict! We got back tonight," said Maud
glibly. "Go ahead, Queenie. I'll be chasing up and down here,
waiting." In a lower tone: "Get through with him quick. Strike
him for five more after you get the first five. He's a blob."

When Susan came slinking through the office of the hotel in the
wake of the man two hours later, Maud sprang from the little
parlor. "How much did you get?" she asked in an undertone.

Susan looked nervously at the back of the man who was descending
the stairway to the street. "He said he'd pay me next time,"
she said. "I didn't know what to do. He was polite and----"

Maud seized her by the arm. "Come along!" she cried. As she
passed the desk she said to the clerk, "A dirty bilker! Tryin'
to kiss his way out!"

"Give him hell," said the clerk.

Maud, still gripping Susan, overtook the man at the sidewalk.
"What do you mean by not paying my lady friend?" she shouted.

"Get out!" said the man in a low tone, with an uneasy glance
round. "If you annoy me I'll call the police."

"If you don't cough up mighty damn quick," cried Maud so loudly
that several passers-by stopped, "I'll do the calling myself,
you bum, and have you pinched for insulting two respectable
working girls." And she planted herself squarely before him.
Susan drew back into the shadow of the wall.

Up stepped Max, who happened to be standing outside his place.
"What's the row about?" he demanded.

"These women are trying to blackmail me," said the man, sidling away.

Maud seized him by the arm. "Will you cough up or shall I
scream?" she cried.

"Stand out of the way, girls," said Max savagely, "and let me
take a crack at the----."

The man dived into his pocket, produced a bill, thrust it
toward Susan. Maud saw that it was a five. "That's only
five," she cried. "Where's the other five?"

"Five was the bargain," whined the man.

"Do you want me to push in your blinkers, you damned old bilk,
you?" cried Max, seizing him violently by the arm. The man
visited his pocket again, found another five, extended the two.
Maud seized them. "Now, clear out!" said Max. "I hate to let
you go without a swift kick in the pants."

Maud pressed the money on Susan and thanked Max. Said Max,
"Don't forget to tell Freddie what I done for his girl."

"She'll tell him, all right," Maud assured him.

As the girls went east through Forty-second Street, Susan said,
"I'm afraid that man'll lay for us."

"Lay for us," laughed Maud. "He'll run like a cat afire if he
ever sights us again."

"I feel queer and faint," said Susan. "I must have a drink."

"Well--I'll go with you. But I've got to get busy. I want a
couple of days off this week for my little fellow, so I must
hustle. You let that dirty dog keep you too long. Half an
hour's plenty enough. Always make 'em cough up in advance,
then hustle 'em through. And don't listen to their guff about
wanting to see you again if you treat 'em right. There's
nothing in it."

They went into a restaurant bar near Broadway. Susan took two
drinks of whiskey raw in rapid succession; Maud took one
drink--a green mint with ice. "While you was fooling away time
with that thief," said she, "I had two men--got five from one,
three from the other. The five-dollar man took a three-dollar
room--that was seventy-five for me. The three-dollar man
wouldn't stand for more than a dollar room--so I got only a
quarter there. But he set 'em up to two rounds of drinks--a
quarter more for me. So I cleared nine twenty-five. And you'd
'a' got only your twenty-five cents commission on the room if
it hadn't been for me. You forgot to collect your commission.
Well, you can get it next time. Only I wouldn't _ask_ for it,
Max was so nice in helping out. He'll give you the quarter."

When Susan had taken her second stiff drink, her eyes were
sparkling and she was laughing recklessly. "I want a
cigarette," she said.

"You feel bully, don't you?"

"I'm ready for anything," declared she giddily. "I don't give
a damn. I'm over the line. I--_don't_--give--a--damn!"

"I used to hate the men I went up with," said Maud, "but now
I hardly look at their faces. You'll soon be that way. Then
you'll only drink for fun. Drink--and dope--they are about the
only fun we have--them and caring about some fellow."

"How many girls has Freddie got?"

"Search me. Not many that he'd speak to himself. Jim's his
wardman--does his collecting for him. Freddie's above most of
the men in this business. The others are about like Jim--tough
straight through, but Freddie's a kind of a pullman. The other
men-even Jim--hate him for being such a snare and being able to
hide it that he's in such a low business. They'd have done him
up long ago, if they could. But he's to wise for them. That's
why they have to do what he says. I tell you, you're in
right, for sure. You'll have Freddie eating out of your hand,
if you play a cool hand."

Susan ordered another drink and a package of Egyptian
cigarettes. "They don't allow ladies to smoke in here," said
Maud. "We'll go to the washroom."

And in the washroom they took a few hasty puffs before sallying
forth again. Usually Sunday night was dull, all the men having
spent their spare money the night before, and it being a bad
night for married men to make excuses for getting away from
home. Maud explained that, except "out-of-towners," the
married men were the chief support of their profession--"and
most of the cornhuskers are married men, too." But Susan had
the novice's luck. When she and Maud met Maud's "little
gentleman friend" Harry Tucker at midnight and went to
Considine's for supper, Susan had taken in "presents" and
commissions twenty-nine dollars and a half. Maud had not done
so badly, herself; her net receipts were twenty-two fifty.

She would not let Susan pay any part of the supper bill, but
gave Harry the necessary money. "Here's a five," said she,
pressing the bill into his hand, "and keep the change."

And she looked at him with loving eyes of longing. He was a
pretty, common-looking fellow, a mere boy, who clerked in a
haberdashery in the neighborhood. As he got only six dollars
a week and had to give five to his mother who sewed, he could
not afford to spend money on Maud, and she neither expected nor
wished it. When she picked him up, he like most of his
fellow-clerks had no decent clothing but the suit he had to
have to "make a front" at the store. Maud had outfitted him
from the skin with the cheap but showy stuff exhibited for just
such purposes in the Broadway windows. She explained
confidentially to Susan:

"It makes me sort of feel that I own him. Then, too, in love
there oughtn't to be any money. If he paid, I'd be as cold to
him as I am to the rest. The only reason I like Jim at all is
I like a good beating once in a while. It's exciting. Jim--he
treats me like the dirt under his feet. And that's what we
are--dirt under the men's feet. Every woman knows it, when it
comes to a showdown between her and a man. As my pop used to
say, the world was made for men, not for women. Still, our
graft ain't so bum, at that--if we work it right."

Freddie called on Susan about noon the next day. She was still
in bed. He was dressed in the extreme of fashion, was wearing
a chinchilla-lined coat. He looked the idle, sportively
inclined son of some rich man in the Fifth Avenue district. He
was having an affair with a much admired young actress--was
engaged in it rather as a matter of vanity and for the
fashionable half-world associations into which it introduced
him rather than from any present interest in the lady. He
stood watching Susan with a peculiar expression--one he might
perhaps have found it hard to define himself. He bent over her
and carelessly brushed her ear with his lips. "How did your
royal highness make out?" inquired he.

"The money's in the top bureau drawer," replied she, the covers
up to her eyes and her eyes closed.

He went to the bureau, opened the drawer, with his gloved hands
counted the money. As he counted his eyes had a look in them
that was strangely like jealous rage. He kept his back toward
her for some time after he had crossed to look at the money.
When he spoke it was to say:

"Not bad. And when you get dressed up a bit and lose your
stage fright, you'll do a smashing business. I'll not take my
share of this. I had a good run with the cards last night.
Anyhow, you've got to pay your rent and buy some clothes. I've
got to invest something in my new property. It's badly run
down. You'll get busy again tonight, of course. Never lay
off, lady, unless the weather's bad. You'll find you won't
average more than twenty good business days a month in summer
and fall, and only about ten in winter and spring, when it's
cold and often lots of bad weather in the afternoons and
evenings. That means hustle."

No sign from Susan. He sat on the bed and pulled the covers
away from her face. "What are you so grouchy about, pet?" he
inquired, chucking her under the chin.

"Nothing."

"Too much booze, I'll bet. Well, sleep your grouch off. I've
got a date with Finnegan. The election's coming on, and I have
to work--lining up the vote and getting the repeaters ready.
It all means good money for me. Look out about the booze,
lady. It'll float you into trouble--trouble with me, I mean."
And he patted her bare shoulders, laughed gently, went to the door.
He paused there, struggled with an impulse to turn--departed. VII

BUT she did not "look out about the booze." Each morning she
awoke in a state of depression so horrible that she wondered
why she could not bring herself to plan suicide. Why was it?
Her marriage? Yes--and she paid it its customary tribute of a
shudder. Yes, her marriage had made all things thereafter
possible. But what else? Lack of courage? Lack of
self-respect? Was it not always assumed that a woman in her
position, if she had a grain of decent instinct, would rush
eagerly upon death? Was she so much worse than others? Or was
what everybody said about these things--everybody who had
experience--was it false, like nearly everything else she had
been taught? She did not understand; she only knew that hope
was as strong within her as health itself--and that she did not
want to die--and that at present she was helpless.

One evening the man she was with--a good-looking and unusually
interesting young chap--suddenly said:

"What a heart action you have got! Let me listen to that again."

"Is it all wrong?" asked Susan, as he pressed his ear against
her chest.

"You ask that as if you rather hoped it was."

"I do--and I don't."

"Well," said he, after listening for a third time, "you'll
never die of heart trouble. I never heard a heart with such a
grand action--like a big, powerful pump, built to last forever.
You're never ill, are you?"

"Not thus far."

"And you'll have a hard time making yourself ill.

Health? Why, your health must be perfect. Let me see." And
he proceeded to thump and press upon her chest with an
expertness that proclaimed the student of medicine. He was all
interest and enthusiasm, took a pencil and, spreading a sheet upon
her chest over her heart, drew its outlines. "There!" he cried.

"What is it?" asked Susan. "I don't understand."

The young man drew a second and much smaller heart within the
outline of hers. "This," he explained, "is about the size of
an ordinary heart. You can see for yourself that yours is
fully one-fourth bigger than the normal."

"What of it?" said Susan.

"Why, health and strength--and vitality--courage--hope--all
one-fourth above the ordinary allowance. Yes, more than a
fourth. I envy you. You ought to live long, stay young until
you're very old--and get pretty much anything you please. You
don't belong to this life. Some accident, I guess. Every once
in a while I run across a case something like yours. You'll go
back where you belong. This is a dip, not a drop."

"You sound like a fortune-teller." She was smiling mockingly.
But in truth she had never in all her life heard words that
thrilled her so, that heartened her so.

"I am. A scientific fortune-teller. And what that kind says
comes true, barring accidents. As you're not ignorant and
careless this life of yours isn't physiologically bad. On the
contrary, you're out in the open air much of the time and get
the splended exercise of walking--a much more healthful life,
in the essential ways, than respectable women lead. They're
always stuffing, and rumping it. They never move if they can
help. No, nothing can stop you but death--unless you're far less
intelligent than you look. Oh, yes--death and one other thing."

"Drink." And he looked shrewdly at her.

But drink she must. And each day, as soon as she dressed and
was out in the street, she began to drink, and kept it up until
she had driven off the depression and had got herself into the
mood of recklessness in which she found a certain sardonic
pleasure in outraging her own sensibilities. There is a stage
in a drinking career when the man or the woman becomes depraved
and ugly as soon as the liquor takes effect. But she was far
from this advanced stage. Her disposition was, if anything,
more sweet and generous when she was under the influence of
liquor. The whiskey--she almost always drank whiskey--seemed
to act directly and only upon the nerves that ached and
throbbed when she was sober, the nerves that made the life she
was leading seem loathsome beyond the power of habit to
accustom. With these nerves stupefied, her natural gayety
asserted itself, and a fondness for quiet and subtle
mockery--her indulgence in it did not make her popular with
vain men sufficiently acute to catch her meaning.

By observation and practice she was soon able to measure the
exact amount of liquor that was necessary to produce the proper
state of intoxication at the hour for going "on duty." That
gayety of hers was of the surface only. Behind it her real
self remained indifferent or somber or sardonic, according to
her mood of the day. And she had the sense of being in the
grasp of a hideous, fascinating nightmare, of being dragged
through some dreadful probation from which she would presently
emerge to ascend to the position she would have earned by her
desperate fortitude. The past--unreal. The present--a waking
dream. But the future--ah, the future!

He has not candidly explored far beneath the surface of things
who does not know the strange allure, charm even, that many
loathsome things possess. And drink is peculiarly fitted to
bring out this perverse quality--drink that blurs all the
conventionalities, even those built up into moral ideas by
centuries and ages of unbroken custom. The human animal, for
all its pretenses of inflexibility, is almost infinitely
adaptable--that is why it has risen in several million years of
evolution from about the humblest rank in the mammalian family
to overlordship of the universe. Still, it is doubtful if,
without drink to help her, a girl of Susan's intelligence and
temperament would have been apt to endure. She would probably
have chosen the alternative--death. Hundreds, perhaps
thousands, of girls, at least her equals in sensibility, are
caught in the same calamity every year, tens of thousands, ever
more and more as our civilization transforms under the pressure
of industrialism, are caught in the similar calamities of
soul-destroying toil. And only the few survive who have
perfect health and abounding vitality. Susan's iron strength
enabled her to live; but it was drink that enabled her to
endure. Beyond question one of the greatest blessings that
could now be conferred upon the race would be to cure it of the
drink evil. But at the same time, if drink were taken away
before the causes of drink were removed, there would be an
appalling increase in suicide--in insanity, in the general
total of human misery. For while drink retards the growth of
intelligent effort to end the stupidities in the social system,
does it not also help men and women to bear the consequences of
those stupidities? Our crude and undeveloped new civilization,
strapping men and women and children to the machines and
squeezing all the energy out of them, all the capacity for
vital life, casts them aside as soon as they are useless but
long before they are dead. How unutterably wretched they would
be without drink to give them illusions!

Susan grew fond of cigarettes, fond of whiskey; to the rest
she after a few weeks became numb--no new or strange phenomenon
in a world where people with a cancer or other hideous running
sore or some gross and frightful deformity of fat or
excrescence are seen laughing, joining freely and comfortably
in the company of the unafflicted. In her affliction Susan at
least saw only those affected like herself--and that helped not
a little, helped the whiskey to confuse and distort her outlook
upon life.

The old Cartesian formula--"I think, therefore I am"--would
come nearer to expressing a truth, were it reversed--"I am,
therefore I think." Our characters are compressed, and our
thoughts bent by our environment. And most of us are
unconscious of our slavery because our environment remains
unchanged from birth until death, and so seems the whole
universe to us.

In spite of her life, in spite of all she did to disguise
herself, there persisted in her face--even when she was dazed or
giddied or stupefied with drink--the expression of the woman on
the right side of the line. Whether it was something in her
character, whether it was not rather due to superiority of
breeding and intelligence, would be difficult to say. However,
there was the _different_ look that irritated many of the other
girls, interfered with her business and made her feel a
hypocrite. She heard so much about the paleness of her lips
that she decided to end that comment by using paint--the
durable kind Ida had recommended. When her lips flamed
carmine, a strange and striking effect resulted. The sad sweet
pensiveness of her eyes--the pallor of her clear skin--then,
that splash of bright red, artificial, bold, defiant--the
contrast of the combination seemed somehow to tell the story of
her life her past no less than her present. And when her
beauty began to come back--for, hard though her life was, it
was a life of good food, of plenty of sleep, of much open air;
so it put no such strain upon her as had the life of the
factory and the tenement--when her beauty came back, the effect
of that contrast of scarlet splash against the sad purity of
pallid cheeks and violet-gray eyes became a mark of
individuality, of distinction. It was not long before Susan
would have as soon thought of issuing forth with her body
uncovered as with her lips unrouged.

She turned away from men who sought her a second time. She was
difficult to find, she went on "duty" only enough days each
week to earn a low average of what was expected from the girls
by their protectors. Yet she got many unexpected presents--and
so had money to lend to the other girls, who soon learned how
"easy" she was.

Maud, sometimes at her own prompting, sometimes prompted by
Jim, who was prompted by Freddie--warned her every few days that
she was skating on the thinnest of ice. But she went her way.
Not until she accompanied a girl to an opium joint to discover
whether dope had the merits claimed for it as a deadener of
pain and a producer of happiness--not until then did Freddie
come in person.

"I hear," said he and she wondered whether he had heard from
Max or from loose-tongued Maud--"that you come into the hotel
so drunk that men sometimes leave you right away again--go
without paying you."

"I must drink," said Susan.

"You must _stop_ drink," retorted he, amiable in his terrible
way. "If you don't, I'll have you pinched and sent up.
That'll bring you to your senses."

"I must drink," said Susan.

"Then I must have you pinched," said he with his mocking laugh.
"Don't be a fool," he went on. "You can make money enough to
soon buy the right sort of clothes so that I can afford to be
seen with you. I'd like to take you out once in a while and
give you a swell time. But what'd we look like together--with
you in those cheap things out of bargain troughs? Not that you
don't look well--for you do. But the rest of you isn't up to
your feet and to the look in your face. The whole thing's got to
be right before a lady can sit opposite _me_ in Murray's or Rector's."

"All I ask is to be let alone," said Susan.

"That isn't playing square--and you've got to play square. What
I want is to set you up in a nice parlor trade--chaps from the
college and the swell clubs and hotels. But I can't do
anything for you as long as you drink this way. You'll have to
stay on the streets."

"That's where I want to stay."

"Well, there's something to be said for the streets," Freddie
admitted. "If a woman don't intend to make sporting her life
business, she don't want to get up among the swells of the
profession, where she'd become known and find it hard to
sidestep. Still, even in the street you ought to make a
hundred, easy--and not go with any man that doesn't suit you."

"Any man that doesn't suit me," said Susan. And, after a
pause, she said it again: "Any man that doesn't suit me."

The young man, with his shrewdness of the street-graduate and
his sensitiveness of the Italian, gave her an understanding
glance. "You look as if you couldn't decide whether to laugh
or cry. I'd try to laugh if I was you."

She had laughed as he spoke.

Freddie nodded approval. "That sounded good to me. You're
getting broken in. Don't take yourself so seriously. After
all, what are you doing? Why, learning to live like a man."

She found this new point of view interesting--and true, too.
Like a man--like all men, except possibly a few--not enough
exceptions to change the rule. Like a man; getting herself
hardened up to the point where she could take part in the cruel
struggle on equal terms with the men. It wasn't their
difference of body any more than it was their difference of
dress that handicapped women; it was the idea behind skirt and
sex--and she was getting rid of that. . . .

The theory was admirable; but it helped her not at all in
practice. She continued to keep to the darkness, to wait in
the deep doorways, so far as she could in her "business hours,"
and to repulse advances in the day time or in public
places--and to drink. She did not go again to the opium joint,
and she resisted the nightly offers of girls and their
"gentlemen friends" to try cocaine in its various forms.
"Dope," she saw, was the medicine of despair. And she was far
from despair. Had she not youth? Had she not health and
intelligence and good looks? Some day she would have finished
her apprenticeship. Then--the career!

Freddie let her alone for nearly a month, though she was
earning less than fifty dollars a week--which meant only thirty
for him. He had never "collected" from her directly, but
always through Jim; and she had now learned enough of the
methods of the system of which she was one of the thousands of
slaves to appreciate that she was treated by Jim with unique
consideration. Not only by the surly and brutal Jim, but also
by the police who oppressed in petty ways wherever they dared
because they hated Freddie's system which took away from them
a part of the graft they regarded as rightfully theirs.

Yes, rightfully theirs. And anyone disposed to be critical of
police morality--or of Freddie Palmer morality--in this matter
of graft would do well to pause and consider the source of his
own income before he waxes too eloquent and too virtuous.
Graft is one of those general words that mean everything and
nothing. What is graft and what is honest income? Just where
shall we draw the line between rightful exploitation of our
fellow-beings through their necessities and their ignorance of
their helplessness, and wrongful exploitation? Do attempts to
draw that line resolve down to making virtuous whatever I may
appropriate and vicious whatever is appropriated in ways other
than mine? And if so are not the police and the Palmers
entitled to their day in the moral court no less than the
tariff-baron and market-cornerer, the herder and driver of wage
slaves, the retail artists in cold storage filth, short weight
and shoddy goods? However, "we must draw the line somewhere"
or there will be no such thing as morality under our social
system. So why not draw it at anything the other fellow does
to make money. In adopting this simple rule, we not only
preserve the moralities from destruction but also establish our
own virtue and the other fellow's villainy. Truly, never is
the human race so delightfully, so unconsciously, amusing as
when it discusses right and wrong.

When she saw Freddie again, he was far from sober. He showed
it by his way of beginning. Said he:

"I've got to hand you a line of rough talk, Queenie. I took on
this jag for your especial benefit," said he. "I'm a fool
about you and you take advantage of it. That's bad for both of
us. . . . You're drinking as much as ever?"

"More," replied she. "It takes more and more."

"How can you expect to get on?" cried he, exasperated.

"As I told you, I couldn't make a cent if I didn't drink."

Freddie stared moodily at her, then at the floor--they were in
her room. Finally he said:

"You get the best class of men. I put my swell friends on to
where you go slipping by, up and down in the shadow--and it's
all they can do to find you. The best class of men--men all
the swell respectable girls in town are crazy to hook up
with--those of 'em that ain't married already. If you're good
enough for those chaps they ought to be good enough for you.
Yet some of 'em complain to me that they get thrown down--and
others kick because you were too full--and, damn it, you act so
queer that you scare 'em away. What am I to do about it?"

She was silent.

"I want you to promise me you'll take a brace."

No answer.

"You won't promise?"

"No--because I don't intend to. I'm doing the best I can."

"You think I'm a good thing. You think I'll take anything off
you, because I'm stuck on you--and appreciate that you ain't on
the same level with the rest of these heifers. Well--I'll not
let any woman con me. I never have. I never will. And I'll
make you realize that you're not square with me. I'll let you
get a taste of life as it is when a girl hasn't got a friend
with a pull."

"As you please," said Susan indifferently. "I don't in the
least care what happens to me."

"We'll see about that," cried he, enraged. "I'll give you a
week to brace up in."

The look he shot at her by way of finish to his sentence was
menacing enough. But she was not disturbed; these signs of
anger tended to confirm her in her sense of security from him.
For it was wholly unlike the Freddie Palmer the rest of the
world knew, to act in this irresolute and stormy way. She knew
that Palmer, in his fashion, cared for her--better still, liked
her--liked to talk with her, liked to show--and to develop--the
aspiring side of his interesting, unusual nature for her benefit.

A week passed, during which she did not see him. But she heard
that he was losing on both the cards and the horses and was
drinking wildly. A week--ten days--then----

One night, as she came out of a saloon a block or so down Seventh
Avenue from Forty-second, a fly cop seized her by the arm.

"Come along," said he roughly. "You're drinking and
soliciting. I've got to clear the streets of some of these
tarts. It's got so decent people can't move without falling
over 'em."

Susan had not lived in the tenement districts where the
ignorance and the helplessness and the lack of a voice that can
make itself heard among the ruling classes make the sway of the
police absolute and therefore tyrannical--she had not lived
there without getting something of that dread and horror of the
police which to people of the upper classes seems childish or
evidence of secret criminal hankerings. And this nervousness
had latterly been increased to terror by what she had learned
from her fellow-outcasts--the hideous tales of oppression, of
robbery, of bodily and moral degradation. But all this terror
had been purely fanciful, as any emotion not of experience
proves to be when experience evokes the reality. At that
touch, at the sound of those rough words--at that _reality_ of
the terror she had imagined from the days when she went to work
at Matson's and to live with the Brashears, she straightway
lost consciousness. When her senses returned she was in a
cell, lying on a wooden bench.

There must have been some sort of wild struggle; for her
clothes were muddy, her hat was crushed into shapelessness, her
veil was so torn that she had difficulty in arranging it to act
as any sort of concealment. Though she had no mirror at which
to discover the consolation, she need have had no fear of being
recognized, so distorted were all her features by the frightful
paroxysms of grief that swept and ravaged her body that night.
She fainted again when they led her out to put her in the wagon.

She fainted a third time when she heard her name--"Queenie
Brown"--bellowed out by the court officer. They shook her into
consciousness, led her to the court-room. She was conscious of
a stifling heat, of a curious crowd staring at her with eyes
which seemed to bore red hot holes into her flesh. As she
stood before the judge, with head limp upon her bosom, she
heard in her ear a rough voice bawling, "You're discharged.
The judge says don't come here again." And she was pushed
through an iron gate. She walked unsteadily up the aisle,
between two masses of those burning-eyed human monsters. She
felt the cold outside air like a vast drench of icy water flung
upon her. If it had been raining, she might have gone toward
the river. But than{sic} that day New York had never been more
radiantly the City of the Sun. How she got home she never
knew, but late in the afternoon she realized that she was in
her own room.

Hour after hour she lay upon the bed, body and mind inert.
Helpless--no escape--no courage to live--yet no wish to die.
How much longer would it last? Surely the waking from this
dream must come soon.

About noon the next day Freddie came. "I let you off easy,"
said he, sitting on the bed upon which she was lying dressed as
when she came in the day before. "Have you been drinking again?"

"No," she muttered.

"Well--don't. Next time, a week on the Island. . . . Did you hear?"

"Yes."

"Don't turn me against you. I'd hate to have to make an awful
example of you."

"I must drink," she repeated in the same stolid way.

He abruptly but without shock lifted her to a sitting position.
His arm held her body up; her head was thrown back and her face
was looking calmly at him. She realized that he had been
drinking--drinking hard. Her eyes met his terrible eyes
without flinching. He kissed her full upon the lips. With her
open palm she struck him across the cheek, bringing the red
fierily to its smooth fair surface. The devil leaped into his
eyes, the devil of cruelty and lust. He smiled softly and
wickedly. "I see you've forgotten the lesson I gave you three
months ago. You've got to be taught to be afraid all over again."

"I _am_ not afraid," said she. "I _was_ not afraid. You can't
make me afraid."

"We'll see," murmured he. And his fingers began to caress her
round smooth throat.

"If you ever strike me again," she said quietly, "I'll kill you."

His eyes flinched for an instant--long enough to let her know
his innermost secret. "I want you--I want _you_--damn you," he
said, between his clinched teeth. "You're the first one I
couldn't get. There's something in you I can't get!"

"That's _me_," she replied.

"You hate me, don't you?"

"No."

"Then you love me?"

"No. I care nothing about you."

He let her drop back to the bed, went to the window, stood
looking out moodily. After a while he said without turning:

"My mother kept a book shop--on the lower East Side. She
brought me up at home. At home!" And he laughed sardonically.
"She hated me because I looked like my father."

Silence, then he spoke again:

"You've never been to my flat. I've got a swell place. I want
to cut out this part of the game. I can get along without it.
You're going to move in with me, and stop this street business.
I make good money. You can have everything you want."

"I prefer to keep on as I am."

"What's the difference? Aren't you mine whenever I want you?"

"I prefer to be free."

"_Free!_ Why, you're not free. Can't I send you to the Island
any time I feel like it--just as I can the other girls?"

"Yes--you can do that. But I'm free, all the same."

"No more than the other girls."

"Yes."

"What do you mean?"

"Unless you understand, I couldn't make you see it," she said.
She was sitting on the edge of the bed, doing up her hair,
which had partly fallen down. "I think you do understand."

"What in the hell do you want, anyhow?" he demanded.

"If I knew--do you suppose I'd be here?"

He watched her with baffled, longing eyes. "What is it," he
muttered, "that's so damn peculiar about you?"

It was the question every shrewd observant person who saw her
put to himself in one way or another; and there was excellent
reason why this should have been.

Life has a certain set of molds--lawyer, financier, gambler,
preacher, fashionable woman, prostitute, domestic woman,
laborer, clerk, and so on through a not extensive list of
familiar types with which we all soon become acquainted. And
to one or another of these patterns life fits each of us as we
grow up. Not one in ten thousand glances into human faces is
arrested because it has lit upon a personality that cannot be
immediately located, measured, accounted for. The reason for
this sterility of variety which soon makes the world rather
monotonous to the seeing eye is that few of us are born with
any considerable amount of personality, and what little we have
is speedily suppressed by a system of training which is
throughout based upon an abhorrence of originality. We obey
the law of nature--and nature so abhors variety that, whenever
a variation from a type happens, she tries to kill it, and,
that failing, reproduces it a myriad times to make it a type.
When an original man or woman appears and all the strenuous
effort to suppress him or her fails, straightway spring up a
thousand imitators and copiers, and the individuality is lost
in the school, the fashion, the craze. We have not the courage
to be ourselves, even where there is anything in us that might
be developed into something distinctive enough to win us the
rank of real identity. Individuality--distinction--where it
does exist, almost never shows until experience brings it
out--just as up to a certain stage the embryo of any animal is
like that of every other animal, though there is latent in it
the most positive assertion of race and sex, of family, type,
and so on.

Susan had from childhood possessed certain qualities of
physical beauty, of spiritedness, of facility in mind and
body--the not uncommon characteristic of the child that is the
flower of passionate love. But now there was beginning to show
in her a radical difference from the rest of the crowd pouring
through the streets of the city. It made the quicker observers
in the passing throng turn the head for a second and wondering
glance. Most of them assumed they had been stirred by her
superiority of face and figure. But striking faces and figures
of the various comely types are frequent in the streets of New
York and of several other American cities. The truth was that
they were interested by her expression--an elusive expression
telling of a soul that was being moved to its depths by
experience which usually finds and molds mere passive material.
This expression was as evident in her mouth as in her eyes, in
her profile as in her full face. And as she sat there on the
edge of the bed twisting up her thick dark hair, it was this
expression that disconcerted Freddie Palmer, for the first time
in all his contemptuous dealings with the female sex. In his
eyes was a ferocious desire to seize her and again try to
conquer and to possess.

She had become almost unconscious of his presence. He startled
her by suddenly crying, "Oh, you go to hell!" and flinging from
the room, crashing the door shut behind him.

Maud had grown tired of the haberdasher's clerk and his
presumptions upon her frank fondness which he wholly
misunderstood. She had dropped him for a rough looking
waiter-singer in a basement drinking place. He was beating her
and taking all the money she had for herself, and was spending
it on another woman, much older than Maud and homely--and Maud
knew, and complained of him bitterly to everyone but himself.
She was no longer hanging round Susan persistently, having been
discouraged by the failure of her attempts at intimacy with a
girl who spent nearly all her spare time at reading or at plays
and concerts. Maud was now chumming with a woman who preyed
upon the patrons of a big Broadway hotel--she picked them up
near the entrance, robbed them, and when they asked the hotel
detectives to help them get back their stolen money, the
detectives, who divided with her, frightened them off by saying
she was a mulatto and would compel them to make a public
appearance against her in open court. This woman, older and
harder than most of the girls, though of quiet and refined
appearance and manner, was rapidly dragging Maud down. Also,
Maud's looks were going because she ate irregularly all kinds
of trash, and late every night ate herself full to bursting and
drank herself drunk to stupefaction.

Susan's first horror of the men she met--men of all
classes--was rapidly modified into an inconsistent, therefore
characteristically human, mingling of horror and tolerance.
Nobody, nothing, was either good or bad, but all veered like
weathercocks in the shifting wind. She decided that people
were steadily good only where their lot happened to be cast in
a place in which the good wind held steadily, and that those
who were usually bad simply had the misfortune to have to live
where the prevailing winds were bad.

For instance, there was the handsome, well educated, well
mannered young prize-fighter, Ned Ballou, who was Estelle's
"friend." Ballou, big and gentle and as incapable of bad humor
as of constancy or of honesty about money matters, fought under
the name of Joe Geary and was known as Upper Cut Joe because
usually, in the third round, never later than the fifth, he
gave the knockout to his opponent by a cruelly swift and savage
uppercut. He had educated himself marvelously well. But he
had been brought up among thieves and had by some curious freak
never learned to know what a moral sense was, which is one--and
a not unattractive--step deeper down than those who know what
a moral sense is but never use it. At supper in Gaffney's he
related to Susan and Estelle how he had won his greatest
victory--the victory of Terry the Cyclone, that had lifted him
up into the class of secure money-makers. He told how he
always tried to "rattle" his opponent by talking to him, by
pouring out in an undertone a stream of gibes, jeers, insults.
The afternoon of the fight Terry's first-born had died, but the
money for the funeral expenses and to save the wife from the
horrors and dangers of the free wards had to be earned. Joe
Geary knew that he must win this fight or drop into the working
or the criminal class. Terry was a "hard one"; so
circumstances compelled, those desperate measures which great
men, from financiers and generals down to prize-fighters, do
not shrink from else they would not be great, but small.

As soon as he was facing Terry in the ring--Joe so he related
with pride in his cleverness--began to "guy"--"Well, you Irish
fake--so the kid's dead--eh? Who was its pa, say?--the dirty
little bastard--or does the wife know which one it was----" and
so on. And Terry, insane with grief and fury, fought wild--and
Joe became a champion.

As she listened Susan grew cold with horror and with hate.
Estelle said:

"Tell the rest of it, Joe."

"Oh, that was nothing," replied he.

When he strolled away to talk with some friends Estelle told
"the rest" that was "nothing." The championship secure, Joe
had paid all Terry's bills, had supported Terry and his wife
for a year, had relapsed into old habits and "pulled off a job"
of safe-cracking because, the prize-fighting happening to pay
poorly, he would have had a default on the payments for a month
or so. He was caught, did a year on the Island before his
"pull" could get him out. And all the time he was in the "pen"
he so arranged it with his friends that the invalid Terry and
his invalid wife did not suffer. And all this he had done not
because he had a sense of owing Terry, but because he was of
the "set" in which it is the custom to help anybody who happens
to need it, and aid begun becomes an obligation to "see it through."

It was an extreme case of the moral chaos about her--the chaos
she had begun to discover when she caught her aunt and Ruth
conspiring to take Sam away from her.

What a world! If only these shifting, usually evil winds of
circumstance could be made to blow good!

A few evenings after the arrest Maud came for Susan, persuaded
her to go out. They dined at about the only good restaurant
where unescorted women were served after nightfall. Afterward
they went "on duty." It was fine overhead and the air was
cold and bracing--one of those marvelous New York winter nights
which have the tonic of both sea and mountains and an
exhilaration, in addition, from the intense bright-burning life
of the mighty city. For more than a week there had been a
steady downpour of snow, sleet and finally rain. Thus, the
women of the streets had been doing almost no business. There
was not much money in sitting in drinking halls and the back
rooms of saloons and picking up occasional men; the best trade
was the men who would not venture to show themselves in such
frankly disreputable places, but picked out women in the
crowded streets and followed them to quiet dark places to make
the arrangements--men stimulated by good dinners, or, later on,
in the evening, those who left parties of elegant
respectability after theater or opera. On this first night of
business weather in nearly two weeks the streets were crowded
with women and girls. They were desperately hard up and they
made open dashes for every man they could get at. All classes
were made equally bold--the shop and factory and office and
theater girls with wages too small for what they regarded as a
decent living; the women with young children to support and
educate; the protected professional regulars; the miserable
creatures who had to get along as best they could without
protection, and were prey to every blackmailing officer of an
anti-vice society and to every policeman and fly-cop not above
levying upon women who were "too low to be allowed to live,
anyhow." Out from all kinds of shelters swarmed the women who
were demonstrating how prostitution flourishes and tends to
spread to every class of society whenever education develops
tastes beyond the earning power of their possessors. And with
clothes and food to buy, rent to pay, dependents to support,
these women, so many days hampered in the one way that was open
to them to get money, made the most piteous appeals to the men.
Not tearful appeals, not appeals to sympathy or even to
charity, but to passion. They sought in every way to excite.
They exhibited their carefully gotten-up legs; they made
indecent gestures; they said the vilest things; they offered
the vilest inducements; they lowered their prices down and
down. And such men as did not order them off with disdain,
listened with laughter, made jokes at which the wretched
creatures laughed as gayly as if they were not mad with anxiety
and were not hating these men who were holding on to that which
they must have to live.

"Too many out tonight," said Maud as they walked their
beat--Forty-second between Broadway and Eighth Avenue. "I knew
it would be this way. Let's go in here and get warm."

They went into the back room of a saloon where perhaps half a
dozen women were already seated, some of them gray with the
cold against which their thin showy garments were no
protection. Susan and Maud sat at a table in a corner; Maud
broke her rule and drank whiskey with Susan. After they had
taken perhaps half a dozen drinks, Maud grew really
confidential. She always, even in her soberest moments, seemed
to be telling everything she knew; but Susan had learned that
there were in her many deep secrets, some of which not even
liquor could unlock.

"I'm going to tell you something," she now said to Susan. "You
must promise not to give me away."

"Don't tell me," replied Susan. She was used to being
flattered--or victimized, according to the point of view--with
confidences. She assumed Maud was about to confess some secret
about her own self, as she had the almost universal habit of
never thinking of anyone else. "Don't tell me," said she.
"I'm tired of being used to air awful secrets. It makes me
feel like a tenement wash line."

"This is about you," said Maud. "If it's ever found out that
I put you wise, Jim'll have me killed. Yes--killed."

Susan, reckless by this time, laughed. "Oh, trash!" she said.

"No trash at all," insisted Maud. "When you know this town
through and through you'll know that murder's something that
can be arranged as easy as buying a drink. What risk is there
in making one of _us_ `disappear'? None in the world. I always
feel that Jim'll have me killed some day--unless I go crazy
sometime and kill him. He's stuck on me--or, at least, he's
jealous of me--and if he ever found out I had a
lover--somebody--anybody that didn't pay--why, it'd be all up
with me. Little Maud would go on the grill."

She ordered and slowly drank another whiskey before she
recalled what she had set out to confide. By way of a fresh
start she said, "What do you think of Freddie?"

"I don't know," replied Susan. And it was the truth. Her
instinctive belief in a modified kind of fatalism made her
judgments of people--even of those who caused her to
suffer--singularly free from personal bitterness. Freddie, a
mere instrument of destiny, had his good side, his human side,
she knew. At his worst he was no worse than the others, And
aside from his queer magnetism, there was a certain force in
him that compelled her admiration; at least he was not one of
the petty instruments of destiny. He had in him the same
quality she felt gestating within herself. "I don't know what
to think," she repeated.

Maud had been reflecting while Susan was casting about, as she
had many a time before, for her real opinion of her master who
was in turn the slave of Finnegan, who was in his turn the
slave of somebody higher up, she didn't exactly know who--or
why--or the why of any of it--or the why of the grotesque
savage purposeless doings of destiny in general. Maud now
burst out:

"I don't care. I'm going to put you wise if I die for it."

"Don't," said Susan. "I don't want to know."

"But I've _got_ to tell you. Do you know what Freddie's going to do?"

Susan smiled disdainfully. "I don't care. You mustn't tell
me--when you've been drinking this way "

"Finnegan's police judge is a man named Bennett. As soon as
Bennett comes back to Jefferson Market Police Court, Freddie's
going to have you sent up for three months."

Susan's glass was on the way to her lips. She set it down
again. The drunken old wreck of an entertainer at the piano in
the corner was bellowing out his favorite song--"I Am the King
of the Vikings." Susan began to hum the air.

"It's gospel," cried Maud, thinking Susan did not believe her.
"He's a queer one, is Freddie. They're all afraid of him.
You'd think he was a coward, the way he bullies women and that.
But somehow he ain't--not a bit. He'll be a big man in the
organization some day, they all say. He never lets up till he
gets square. And he thinks you're not square--after all he's
done for you."

"Perhaps not--as he looks at it," said Susan.

"And Jim says he's crazy in love with you, and that he wants to
put you where other men can't see you and where maybe he can
get over caring about you. That's the real reason. He's a
queer devil. But then all men are though none quite like Freddie."

"So I'm to go to the Island for three months," said Susan reflectively.

"You don't seem to care. It's plain you never was there. . . .
And you've got to go. There's no way out of it--unless you
skip to another city. And if you did you never could come back
here. Freddie'd see that you got yours as soon as you landed."

Susan sat looking at her glass. Maud watched her in
astonishment. "You're as queer as Freddie," said she at
length. "I never feel as if I was acquainted with you--not
really. I never had a lady friend like that before. You don't
seem to be a bit excited about what Freddie's going to do. Are
you in love with him?"

Susan lifted strange, smiling eyes to Maud's curious gaze.
"I--in _love_--with a _man_," she said slowly. And then she laughed.

"Don't laugh that way," cried Maud. "It gives me the creeps.
What are you going to do?"

"What can I do?"

"Nothing."

"Then if there's nothing to do, I'll no nothing."

"Go to the Island for three months?"

Susan shrugged her shoulders. "I haven't gone yet." She rose.
"It's too stuffy and smelly in here," said she. "Let's move out."

"No. I'll wait. I promised to meet a gentleman friend here.

You'll not tell that I tipped you off?"

"You'd not have told me if you hadn't known I wouldn't."

"That's so. But--why don't you make it up with Freddie?"

"I couldn't do that."

"He's dead in love. I'm sure you could."

Again Susan's eyes became strange. "I'm sure I couldn't. Good
night." She got as far as the door, came back. "Thank you for
telling me."

"Oh, that's all right," murmured the girl. She was embarrassed
by Susan's manner. She was frightened by Susan's eyes. "You
ain't going to----" There she halted.

"What?"

"To jump off? Kill yourself?"

"Hardly," said Susan. "I've got a lot to do before I die."

She went directly home. Palmer was lying on the bed, a
cigarette between his lips, a newspaper under his feet to
prevent his boots from spoiling the spread--one of the many
small indications of the prudence, thrift and calculation that
underlay the almost insane recklessness of his surface
character, and that would save him from living as the fool
lives and dying as the fool dies.

"I thought you wouldn't slop round in these streets long," said
he, as she paused upon the threshold. "So I waited."

She went to the bureau, unlocked the top drawer, took the
ten-dollar bill she had under some undershirts there, put it in
her right stocking where there were already a five and a two.
She locked the drawer, tossed the key into an open box of
hairpins. She moved toward the door.

"Where are you going?" asked he, still staring at the ceiling.

"Out. I've made almost nothing this week."

"Sit down. I want to talk to you."

She hesitated, seated herself on a chair near the bed.

He frowned at her. "You've been drinking?"

"Yes."

"I've been drinking myself, but I've got a nose like a hunting
dog. What do you do it for?"

"What's the use of explaining? You'd not understand."

"Perhaps I would. I'm one-fourth Italian--and they understand
everything. . . . You're fond of reading, aren't you?"

"It passes the time."

"While I was waiting for you I glanced at your new
books--Emerson--Dickens--Zola." He was looking toward the row of
paper backs that filled almost the whole length of the mantel.
"I must read them. I always like your books. You spend nearly
as much time reading as I do--and you don't need it, for you've
got a good education. What do you read for? To amuse yourself?"

"No."

"To get away from yourself?"

"No."

"Then why?" persisted he.

"To find out about myself."

He thought a moment, turned his face toward her. "You _are_
clever!" he said admiringly. "What's your game?"

"My game?"

"What are you aiming for? You've got too much sense not to be
aiming for something."

She looked at him; the expression that marked her as a person
peculiar and apart was glowing in her eyes like a bed of
red-hot coals covered with ashes.

"What?" he repeated.

"To get strong," replied she. "Women are born weak and bred
weaker. I've got to get over being a woman. For there isn't
any place in this world for a woman except under the shelter of
some man. And I don't want that." The underlying strength of
her features abruptly came into view. "And I won't have it,"
she added.

He laughed. "But the men'll never let _you_ be anything but a woman."

"We'll see," said she, smiling. The strong look had vanished
into the soft contour of her beautiful youth.

"Personally, I like you better when you've been drinking," he
went on. "You're sad when you're sober. As you drink you
liven up."

"When I get over being sad if I'm sober, when I learn to take
things as they come, just like a man--a strong man, then I'll
be----" She stopped.

"Be what?"

"Ready."

"Ready for what?"

"How do I know?"

He swung himself to a sitting position. "Meanwhile, you're
coming to live with me. I've been fighting against it, but I
give up. I need you. You're the one I've been looking for.
Pack your traps. I'll call a cab and we'll go over to my flat.
Then we'll go to Rector's and celebrate."

She shook her head. "I'm sorry, but I can't."

"Why not?"

"I told you. There's something in me that won't let me."

He rose, walked to her very deliberately. He took one of her
hands from her lap, drew her to her feet, put his hands
strongly on her shoulders. "You belong to me," he said, his
lips smiling charmingly, but the devil in the gleam of his eyes
and in the glistening of his beautiful, cruel teeth. "Pack up."

"You know that I won't."

He slowly crushed her in his arms, slowly pressed his lips upon
hers. A low scream issued from her lips and she seized him by
the throat with both hands, one hand over the other, and thrust
him backward. He reeled, fell upon his back on the bed; she
fell with him, clung to him--like a bull dog--not as if she
would not, but as if she could not, let go. He clutched at her
fingers; failing to dislodge them, he tried to thrust his
thumbs into her eyes. But she seized his right thumb between
her teeth and bit into it until they almost met. And at the
same time her knees ground into his abdomen. He choked,
gurgled, grew dark red, then gray, then a faint blackish blue,
lay limp under her. But she did not relax until the blue of
his face had deepened to black and his eyes began to bulge from
their sockets. At those signs that he was beyond doubt
unconscious, she cautiously relaxed her fingers. She
unclenched her teeth; his arm, which had been held up by the
thumb she was biting, dropped heavily. She stood over him, her
eyes blazing insanely at him. She snatched out her hatpin,
flung his coat and waistcoat from over his chest, felt for his
heart. With the murderous eight inches of that slender steel
poniard poised for the drive, she began to sob, flung the
weapon away, took his face between her hands and kissed him.

"You fiend! You fiend!" she sobbed.

She changed to her plainest dress. Leaving the blood-stained
blouse on the bed beside him where she had flung it down after
tearing it off, she turned out the light, darted down stairs
and into the street. At Times Square she took the Subway for
the Bowery. To change one's world, one need not travel far in
New York; the ocean is not so wide as is the gap between the
Tenderloin and the lower East Side. VIII

SHE had thought of escape daily, hourly almost, for nearly five
months. She had advanced not an inch toward it; but she never
for an instant lost hope. She believed in her destiny, felt
with all the strength of her health and vitality that she had
not yet found her place in the world, that she would find it,
and that it would be high. Now--she was compelled to escape,
and this with only seventeen dollars and in the little time
that would elapse before Palmer returned to consciousness and
started in pursuit, bent upon cruel and complete revenge.
She changed to an express train at the Grand Central Subway
station, left the express on impulse at Fourteenth Street, took
a local to Astor Place, there ascended to the street.

She was far indeed from the Tenderloin, in a region not visited
by the people she knew. As for Freddie, he never went below
Fourtenth Street, hated the lower East Side, avoided anyone
from that region of his early days, now shrouded in a mystery
that would not be dispelled with his consent. Freddie would
not think of searching for her there; and soon he would believe
she was dead--drowned, and at the bottom of river or bay. As
she stepped from the exit of the underground, she saw in the
square before her, under the Sunset Cox statue, a Salvation
Army corps holding a meeting. She heard a cry from the center
of the crowd:

"The wages of sin is death!"

She drifted into the fringe of the crowd and glanced at the
little group of exhorters and musicians. The woman who was
preaching had taken the life of the streets as her text. Well
fed and well clad and certain of a clean room to sleep
in--certain of a good living, she was painting the moral
horrors of the street life.

"The wages of sin is death!" she shouted.

She caught Susan's eye, saw the cynical-bitter smile round her
lips. For Susan had the feeling that, unsuspected by the upper
classes, animates the masses as to clergy and charity workers
of all kinds--much the same feeling one would have toward the
robber's messenger who came bringing from his master as a
loving gift some worthless trifle from the stolen goods. Not
from clergy, not from charity worker, not from the life of the
poor as they take what is given them with hypocritical cringe
and tear of thanks, will the upper classes get the truth as to
what is thought of them by the masses in this day of awakening
intelligence and slow heaving of crusts so long firm that they
have come to be regarded as bed-rock of social foundation.

Cried the woman, in response to Susan's satirical look:

"You mock at that, my lovely young sister. Your lips are
painted, and they sneer. But you know I'm right--yes, you show
in your eyes that you know it in your aching heart! The wages
of sin is _death!_ Isn't that so, sister?"

Susan shook her head.

"Speak the truth, sister! God is watching you. The wages of
sin is _death!_"

"The wages of weakness is death," retorted Susan. "But--the
wages of sin--well, it's sometimes a house in Fifth Avenue."

And then she shrank away before the approving laughter of the
little crowd and hurried across into Eighth Street. In the
deep shadow of the front of Cooper Union she paused, as the
meaning of her own impulsive words came to her. The wages of
sin! And what was sin, the supreme sin, but weakness? It was
exactly as Burlingham had explained. He had said that, whether
for good or for evil, really to live one must be strong. Strong!

What a good teacher he had been--one of the rare kind that not
only said things interestingly but also said them so that you
never forgot. How badly she had learned!

She strolled on through Eighth Street, across Third Avenue and
into Second Avenue. It was ten o'clock. The effects of the
liquor she had drunk had worn away. In so much wandering she
had acquired the habit of closing up an episode of life as a
traveler puts behind him the railway journey at its end. She
was less than half an hour from her life in the Tenderloin; it
was as completely in her past as it would ever be. The cards
had once more been shuffled; a new deal was on.

A new deal. What? To fly to another city--that meant another
Palmer, or the miseries of the unprotected woman of the
streets, or slavery to the madman of what the French with cruel
irony call a _maison de joie_. To return to work----

What was open to her, educated as the comfortable classes
educate their women? Work meant the tenements. She loathed
the fast life, but not as she loathed vermin-infected
tenements. To toil all day at a monotonous task, the same task
every day and all day long! To sleep at night with Tucker and
the vermin! To her notion the sights and sounds and smells and
personal contacts of the tenements were no less vicious;
were--for her at least--far more degrading than anything in the
Tenderloin and its like. And there she got money to buy
whiskey that whirled her almost endurably, sometimes even
gayly, over the worst things--money to buy hours, whole days of
respite that could be spent in books, in dreams and plannings,
in the freedom of a clean and comfortable room, or at the
theater or concert. There were degrees in horror; she was
paying a hateful price, but not so hateful as she had paid when
she worked. The wages of shame were not so hard earned as the
wages of toil, were larger, brought her many of the things she
craved. The wages of toil brought her nothing but the right to
bare existence in filth and depravity and darkness. Also, she
felt that if she were tied down to some dull and exhausting
employment, she would be settled and done for. In a few years
she would be an old woman, with less wages or flung out
diseased or maimed--to live on and on like hundreds of wretched
old creatures adrift everywhere in the tenement streets. No,
work had nothing to offer her except "respectability." And
what a mocking was "respectability," in rags and filth!
Besides, what had _she_, the outcast born, to do with this
respectability?

No--not work--never again. So long as she was roving about,
there was hope and chance somehow to break through into the
triumphant class that ruled the world, that did the things
worth while--wore the good clothes, lived in the good houses,
ate the good food, basked in the sunshine of art.

Either she would soar above respectability, or she would remain
beneath it. Respectability might be an excellent thing; surely
there must be some merit in a thing about which there was so
much talk, after which there was so much hankering, and to
which there was such desperate clinging. But as a sole
possession, as a sole ambition, it seemed thin and poor and
even pitiful. She had emancipated herself from its tyranny;
she would not resume the yoke. Among so many lacks of the good
things of life its good would not be missed. Perhaps, when she
had got a few other of the good things she might try to add it
to them--or might find herself able to get comfortably along
without it, as had George Eliot and Aspasia, George Sand and
Duse and Bernhardt and so many of the world's company of
self-elected women members of the triumphant class.

A new deal! And a new deal meant at least even chance for good luck.

As she drifted down the west side of Second Avenue, her
thoughts so absorbed her that she was oblivious of the slushy
sidewalk, even of the crossings where one had to pick one's way
as through a shallow creek with stepping stones here and there.
There were many women alone, as in every other avenue and every
frequented cross street throughout the city--women made eager
to desperation by the long stretch of impossible weather.
Every passing man was hailed, sometimes boldly, sometimes
softly. Again and again that grotesque phrase "Let's go have
a good time" fell upon the ears. After several blocks, when
her absent-mindedness had got her legs wet to the knees in the
shallow shiny slush, she was roused by the sound of music--an
orchestra playing and playing well a lively Hungarian dance.
She was standing before the winter garden from which the sounds
came. As she opened the door she was greeted by a rush of warm
air pleasantly scented with fresh tobacco smoke, the odors of
spiced drinks and of food, pastry predominating. Some of the
tables were covered ready for those who would wish to eat; but
many of them were for the drinkers. The large, low-ceilinged
room was comfortably filled. There were but a few women and
they seemed to be wives or sweethearts. Susan was about to
retreat when a waiter--one of those Austrians whose heads end
abruptly an inch or so above the eyebrows and whose chins soon
shade off into neck--advanced smilingly with a polite, "We
serve ladies without escorts."

She chose a table that had several other vacant tables round
it. On the recommendation of the waiter she ordered a "burning
devil"; he assured her she would find it delicious and the
very thing for a cold slushy night. At the far end of the room
on a low platform sat the orchestra. A man in an evening suit
many sizes too large for him sang in a strong, not disagreeable
tenor a German song that drew loud applause at the end of each
stanza. The "burning devil" came--an almost black mixture in
a large heavy glass. The waiter touched a match to it, and it
was at once wreathed in pale flickering flames that hovered
like butterflies, now rising as if to float away, now lightly
descending to flit over the surface of the liquid or to dance
along the edge of the glass.

"What shall I do with it?" said Susan.

"Wait till it goes out," said the waiter. "Then drink, as you
would anything else." And he was off to attend to the wants of
a group of card players a few feet away.

Susan touched her finger to the glass, when the flame suddenly
vanished. She found it was not too hot to drink, touched her
lips to it. The taste, sweetish, suggestive of coffee and of
brandy and of burnt sugar, was agreeable. She slowly sipped
it, delighting in the sensation of warmth, of comfort, of well
being that speedily diffused through her. The waiter came to
receive her thanks for his advice. She said to him:

"Do you have women sing, too?"

"Oh, yes--when we can find a good-looker with a voice. Our
customers know music."

"I wonder if I could get a trial?"

The waiter was interested at once. "Perhaps. You sing?"

"I have sung on the stage."

"I'll ask the boss."

He went to the counter near the door where stood a short
thick-set Jew of the East European snub-nosed type in earnest
conversation with a seated blonde woman. She showed that skill
at clinging to youth which among the lower middle and lower
classes pretty clearly indicates at least some experience at
the fast life. For only in the upper and upper middle class
does a respectable woman venture thus to advertise so
suspicious a guest within as a desire to be agreeable in the
sight of men. Susan watched the waiter as he spoke to the
proprietor, saw the proprietor's impatient shake of the head,
sent out a wave of gratitude from her heart when her waiter
friend persisted, compelled the proprietor to look toward her.
She affected an air of unconsciousness; in fact, she was posing
as if before a camera. Her heart leaped when out of the corner
of her eye she saw the proprietor coming with the waiter. The
two paused at her table, and the proprietor said in a sharp,
impatient voice:

"Well, lady--what is it?"

"I want a trial as a singer."

The proprietor was scanning her features and her figure which
was well displayed by the tight-fitting jacket. The result
seemed satisfactory, for in a voice oily with the softening
influence of feminine charm upon male, he said:

"You've had experience?"

"Yes--a lot of it. But I haven't sung in about two years."

"Sing German?"

"Only ballads in English. But I can learn anything."

"English'll do--_if_ you can _sing_. What costume do you wear?"
And the proprietor seated himself and motioned the waiter away.

"I have no costume. As I told you, I've not been singing lately."

"We've got one that might fit--a short blue silk skirt--low
neck and blue stockings. Slippers too, but they might be
tight--I forget the number."

"I did wear threes. But I've done a great deal of walking. I
wear a five now." Susan thrust out a foot and ankle, for she
knew that despite the overshoe they were good to look at.

The proprietor nodded approvingly and there was the note of
personal interest in his voice as he said: "They can try your
voice tomorrow morning. Come at ten o'clock."

"If you decide to try me, what pay will I get?"

The proprietor smiled slyly. "Oh, we don't pay anything to the
singers. That man who sang--he gets his board here. He works
in a factory as a bookkeeper in the daytime. Lots of
theatrical and musical people come here. If a man or a girl
can do any stunt worth while, there's a chance."

"I'd have to have something more than board," said Susan.

The proprietor frowned down at his stubby fingers whose black
and cracked nails were drumming on the table. "Well--I might
give you a bed. There's a place I could put one in my
daughter's room. She sings and dances over at Louis Blanc's
garden in Third Avenue. Yes, I could put you there. But--no
privileges, you understand."

"Certainly. . . . I'll decide tomorrow. Maybe you'll not
want me."

"Oh, yes--if you can sing at all. Your looks'd please my
customers." Seeing the dubious expression in Susan's face, he
went on, "When I say `no privilege' I mean only about the room.
Of course, it's none of my business what you do outside. Lots
of well fixed gents comes here. My girls have all had good
luck. I've been open two years, and in that time one of my
singers got an elegant delicatessen owner to keep her."

"Really," said Susan, in the tone that was plainly expected of her.

"Yes--an _elegant_ gentleman. I'd not be surprised if he
married her. And another married an electrician that cops out
forty a week. You'll find it a splendid chance to make nice
friends--good spenders. And I'm a practical man."

"I suppose there isn't any work I could do in the daytime?"

"Not here."

"Perhaps----"

"Not nowhere, so far as I know. That is, work you'd care to
do. The factories and stores is hard on a woman, and she don't
get much. And besides they ain't very classy to my notion. Of
course, if a woman ain't got looks or sense or any tone to her,
if she's satisfied to live in a bum tenement and marry some dub
that can't make nothing, why, that's different. But you look
like a woman that had been used to something and wanted to get
somewhere. I wouldn't have let _my_ daughter go into no such
low, foolish life."

She had intended to ask about a place to stop for the night.
She now decided that the suggestion that she was homeless might
possibly impair her chances. After some further
conversation--the proprietor repeating what he had already
said, and repeating it in about the same language--she paid the
waiter fifteen cents for the drink and a tip of five cents out
of the change she had in her purse, and departed. It had
clouded over, and a misty, dismal rain was trickling through
the saturated air to add to the messiness of the churn of cold
slush. Susan went on down Second Avenue. On a corner near its
lower end she saw a Raines Law hotel with awnings, indicating
that it was not merely a blind to give a saloon a hotel license
but was actually open for business. She went into the
"family" entrance of the saloon, was alone in a small clean
sitting-room with a sliding window between it and the bar. A
tough but not unpleasant young face appeared at the window. It
was the bartender.

"Evening, cutie," said he. "What'll you have?"

"Some rye whiskey," replied Susan. "May I smoke a cigarette here?"

"Sure, go as far as you like. Ten-cent whiskey--or fifteen?"

"Fifteen--unless it's out of the same bottle as the ten."

"Call it ten--seeing as you are a lady. I've got a soft heart
for you ladies. I've got a wife in the business, myself."

When he came in at the door with the drink, a young man
followed him--a good-looking, darkish youth, well dressed in a
ready made suit of the best sort. At second glance Susan saw
that he was at least partly of Jewish blood, enough to elevate
his face above the rather dull type which predominates among
clerks and merchants of the Christian races. He had small,
shifty eyes, an attractive smile, a manner of assurance
bordering on insolence. He dropped into a chair at Susan's
table with a, "You don't mind having a drink on me."

As Susan had no money to spare, she acquiesced. She said to the
bartender, "I want to get a room here--a plain room. How much?"

"Maybe this gent'll help you out," said the bartender with a
grin and a wink. "He's got money to burn--and burns it."

The bartender withdrew. The young man struck a match and held
it for her to light the cigarette she took from her purse.
Then he lit one himself. "Next time try one of mine," said he.
"I get 'em of a fellow that makes for the swellest uptown
houses. But I get 'em ten cents a package instead of forty.
I haven't seen you down here before. What a good skin you've
got! It's been a long time since I've seen a skin as fine as
that, except on a baby now and then. And that shape of yours
is all right, too. I suppose it's the real goods?"

With that he leaned across the table and put his hand upon her
bosom. She drew back indifferently.

"You don't give anything for nothing--eh?" laughed he. "Been
in the business long?"

"It seems long."

"It ain't what it used to be. The competition's getting to be
something fierce. Looks as if all the respectable girls and
most of the married women were coming out to look for a little
extra money. Well--why not?"

Susan shrugged her shoulders. "Why not?" echoed she carelessly.

She did not look forward with pleasure to being alone. The man
was clean and well dressed, and had an unusual amount of
personal charm that softened his impertinence of manner.
Evidently he has the habit of success with women. She much
preferred him sitting with her to her own depressing society.
So she accepted his invitation. She took one of his
cigarettes, and it was as good as he had said. He rattled on,
mingling frank coarse compliments with talk about "the
business" from a standpoint so practical that she began to
suspect he was somehow in it himself. He clearly belonged to
those more intelligent children of the upper class tenement
people, the children who are too bright and too well educated
to become working men and working women like their parents; they
refuse to do any kind of manual labor, as it could never in the
most favorable circumstances pay well enough to give them the
higher comforts they crave, the expensive comforts which every
merchant is insistently and temptingly thrusting at a public
for the most part too poor to buy; so these cleverer children
of the working class develop into shyster lawyers, politicians,
sports, prostitutes, unless chance throws into their way some
respectable means of getting money. Vaguely she
wondered--without caring to question or guess what particular
form of activity this young man had taken in avoiding
monotonous work at small pay.

After her second drink came she found that she did not want it.
She felt tired and sleepy and wished to get her wet stockings
off and to dry her skirt which, for all her careful holding up,
had not escaped the fate of whatever was exposed to that
abominable night. "I'm going along with you," said the young
man as she rose. "Here's to our better acquaintance."

"Thanks, but I want to be alone," replied she affably. And,
not to seem unappreciative of his courtesy, she took a small
drink from her glass. It tasted very queer. She glanced
suspiciously at the young man. Her legs grew suddenly and
strangely heavy. her heart began to beat violently, and a
black fog seemed to be closing in upon her eyes. Through it
she saw the youth grinning sardonically. And instantly she
knew. "What a fool I am!" she thought.

She had been trapped by another form of the slave system. This
man was a recruiting sergeant for houses of prostitution--was
one of the "cadets." They search the tenement districts for
good-looking girls and young women. They hang about the street
corners, flirting. They attend the balls where go the young
people of the lower middle class and upper lower class. They
learn to make love seductively; they understand how to tempt a
girl's longing for finery, for an easier life, her dream of a
husband above her class in looks and in earning power. And for
each recruit "broken in" and hardened to the point of
willingness to go into a sporting house, they get from the
proprietor ten to twenty-five dollars according to her youth
and beauty. Susan knew all about the system, had heard stories
of it from the lips of girls who had been embarked through
it--embarked a little sooner than they would have embarked
under the lash of want, or of that other and almost equally
compelling brute, desire for the comforts and luxuries that
mean decent living. Susan knew; yet here she was, because of
an unguarded moment, and because of a sense of security through
experience--here she was, succumbing to knockout drops as easily
as the most innocent child lured away from its mother's door to
get a saucer of ice cream! She tried to rise, to scream,
though she knew any such effort was futile.

With a gasp and a sigh her head fell forward and she was unconscious.

She awakened in a small, rather dingy room. She was lying on
her back with only stockings on. Beyond the foot of the bed
was a little bureau at which a man, back full to her, stood in
trousers and shirt sleeves tying his necktie. She saw that he
was a rough looking man, coarsely dressed--an artisan or small
shop-keeper. Used as she was to the profound indifference of
men of all classes and degrees of education and intelligence to
what the woman thought--used as she was to this sensual
selfishness which men at least in part conceal from their
respectable wives, Susan felt a horror of this man who had not
minded her unconsciousness. Her head was aching so fiercely
that she had not the courage to move. Presently the man turned
toward her a kindly, bearded face. But she was used to the man
of general good character who with little shame and no
hesitation became beast before her, the free woman.

"Hello, pretty!" cried he, genially. "Slept off your jag, have you?"

He was putting on his coat and waistcoat. He took from the
waistcoat pocket a dollar bill. "You're a peach," said he.
"I'll come again, next time my old lady goes off guard." He
made the bill into a pellet, dropped it on her breast. "A
little present for you. Put it in your stocking and don't let
the madam grab it."

With a groan Susan lifted herself to a sitting position, drew
the spread about her--a gesture of instinct rather than of
conscious modesty. "They drugged me and brought me here," said
she. "I want you to help me get out."

"Good Lord!" cried the man, instantly all a-quiver with
nervousness. "I'm a married man. I don't want to get mixed up
in this." And out of the room he bolted, closing the door
behind him.

Susan smiled at herself satirically. After all her experience,
to make this silly appeal--she who knew men! "I must be
getting feeble-minded," thought she. Then----

Her clothes! With a glance she swept the little room. No
closet! Her own clothes gone! On the chair beside the bed
a fast-house parlor dress of pink cotton silk, and a kind of
abbreviated chemise. The stockings on her legs were not her
own, but were of pink cotton, silk finished. A pair of pink
satin slippers stood on the floor beside the two galvanized
iron wash basins.

The door opened and a burly man, dressed in cheap ready-made
clothes but with an air of authority and prosperity, was
smiling at her. "The madam told me to walk right in and make
myself at home," said he. "Yes, you're up to her account of
you. Only she said you were dead drunk and would probably be
asleep. Now, honey, you treat me right and I'll treat you right."

"Get out of here!" cried Susan. "I'm going to leave this
house. They drugged me and brought me here."

"Oh, come now. I've got nothing to do with your quarrels with
the landlady. Cut those fairy tales out. You treat me right
and----"

A few minutes later in came the madam. Susan, exhausted, sick,
lay inert in the middle of the bed. She fixed her gaze upon
the eyes looking through the hideous mask of paint and powder
partially concealing the madam's face.

"Well, are you going to be a good girl now?" said the madam.

"I want to sleep," said Susan.

"All right, my dear." She saw and snatched the five-dollar
bill from the pillow. "It'll go toward paying your board and
for the parlor dress. God, but you was drunk when they brought
you up from the bar!"

"When was that?" asked Susan.

"About midnight. It's nearly four now. We've shut the house
for the night. You're in a first-rate house, my dear, and if
you behave yourself, you'll make money--a lot more than you
ever could at a dive like Zeist's. If you don't behave well,
we'll teach you how. This building belongs to one of the big
men in politics, and he looks after my interests--and he ought
to, considering the rent I pay--five hundred a month--for the
three upper floors. The bar's let separate. Would you like a
nice drink?"

"No," said Susan. Trapped! Hopelessly trapped! And she would
never escape until, diseased, her looks gone, ruined in body
and soul, she was cast out into the hospital and the gutter.

"As I was saying," ventured the madam, "you might as well
settle down quietly."

"I'm very well satisfied," said Susan. "I suppose you'll give
me a square deal on what I make." She laughed quietly as if
secretly amused at something. "In fact, I know you will," she
added in a tone of amused confidence.

"As soon as you've paid up your twenty-five a week for room and
board and the fifty for the parlor dress----"

Susan interrupted her with a laugh. "Oh, come off," said she.
"I'll not stand for that. I'll go back to Jim Finnegan."

The old woman's eyes pounced for her face instantly. "Do you
know Finnegan?"

"I'm his girl," said Susan carelessly. She stretched herself
and yawned. "I got mad at him and started out for some fun.
He's a regular damn fool about me. But I'm sick of him.
Anything but a jealous man! And spied on everywhere I go. How
much can I make here?"

"Ain't you from Zeist's?" demanded the madam. Her voice was
quivering with fright. She did not dare believe the girl; she
did not dare disbelieve her.

"Zeist's? What's that?" said Susan indifferently.

"The joint two blocks down. Hasn't Joe Bishop had you in there
for a couple of months?"

Susan yawned. "Lord, how my head does ache! Who's Joe Bishop?
I'm dead to the world. I must have had an awful jag!" She
turned on her side, drew the spread over her. "I want to
sleep. So long!"

"Didn't you run away from home with Joe Bishop?" demanded the
madam shrilly. "And didn't he put you to work for Zeist?"

"Who's Joe Bishop? Where's Zeist's?" Susan said, cross and yawning.

"I've been with Jim about a year. He took me off the street.
I was broke in five years ago."

The madam gave a kind of howl. "And that Joe Bishop got
twenty-five off me!" she screamed. "And you're Finnegan's
girl, and he'll make trouble for me."

"He's got a nasty streak in him," said Susan, drowsily. "He
put me on the Island once for a little side trip I made." She
laughed, yawned. "But he sent and got me out in two days--and
gave me a present of a hundred. It's funny how a man'll make
a fool of himself about a woman. Put out the light."

"No, I won't put out the light," shrieked the madam. "You
can't work here. I'm going to telephone Jim Finnegan to come
and get you."

Susan started up angrily, as if she were half-crazed by drink.
"If you do, you old hag," she cried, "I'll tell him you doped
me and set these men on me. I'll tell him about Joe Bishop.
And Jim'll send the whole bunch of you to the pen. I'll not go
back to him till I get good and ready. And that means, I won't
go back at all, no matter what he offers me." She began to cry
in a maudlin way. "I hate him. I'm tired of living as if I
was back in the convent."

The madam stood, heaving to and fro and blowing like a chained
elephant. "I don't know what to do," she whined. "I wish Joe
Bishop was in hell."

"I'm going to get out of here," shrieked Susan, raving and
blazing again and waving her arms. "You don't know a good
thing when you get it. What kind of a bumjoint is this,
anyway? Where's my clothes? They must be dry by this time."

"Yes--yes--they're dry, my dear," whined the madam. "I'll
bring 'em to you."

And out she waddled, returning in a moment with her arms full
of the clothing. She found Susan in the bed and nestling
comfortably into the pillows. "Here are your clothes," she cried.

"No--I want to sleep," was Susan's answer in a cross, drowsy
tone. "I think I'll stay. You won't telephone Jim. But when
he finds me, I'll tell him to go to the devil."

"For God's sake!" wailed the madam. "I can't let you work
here. You don't want to ruin me, do you?"

Susan sat up, rubbed her eyes, yawned, brushed her hair back, put
a sly, smiling look into her face. "How much'll you give me to
go?" she asked. "Where's the fifteen that was in my stocking?"

"I've got it for you," said the madam.

"How much did I make tonight?"

"There was three at five apiece."

Three!--not only the two, but a third while she lay in a dead
stupor. Susan shivered.

"Your share's four dollars," continued the madam.

"Is that all!" cried Susan, jeering. "A bum joint! Oh,
there's my five the man gave me as a present."

"Yes--yes," quavered the madam.

"And another man gave me a dollar." She looked round. "Where
the devil is it?" She found it in a fold of the spread. "Then
you owe me twenty altogether, counting the money I had on me."
She yawned. "I don't want to go!" she protested, pausing
halfway in taking off the second pink stocking. Then she
laughed. "Lord, what hell Jim will raise if he finds I spent
the night working in this house. Why is it that, as soon as
men begin to care for a woman, they get prim about her?"

"Do get dressed, dear," wheedled the madam.

"I don't see why I should go at this time of night," objected
Susan pettishly. "What'll you give me if I go?"

The madam uttered a groan.

"You say you paid Joe Bishop twenty-five----"

"I'll kill him!" shrieked the madam. "He's ruined me--ruined me!"

"Oh, he's all right," said Susan cheerfully. "I like him.
He's a pretty little fellow. I'll not give him away to Jim."

"Joe was dead stuck on you," cried the madam eagerly. "I
might 'a' knowed he hadn't seen you before. I had to pay him
the twenty-five right away, to get him out of the house and let
me put you to work. He wanted to stay on."

Susan shivered, laughed to hide it. "Well, I'll go for twenty-five."

"Twenty-five!" shrieked the madam.

"You'll get it back from Joe."

"Maybe I won't. He's a dog--a dirty dog."

"I think I told Joe about Jim," said Susan reflectively. "I
was awful gabby downstairs. Yes--I told him."

And her lowered eyes gleamed with satisfaction when the madam
cried out: "You did! And after that he brought you here!
He's got it in for me. But I'll ruin him! I'll tear him up!"

Susan dressed with the utmost deliberation, the madam urging
her to make haste. After some argument, Susan yielded to the
madam's pleadings and contented herself with the twenty
dollars. The madam herself escorted Susan down to the outside
door and slathered her with sweetness and politeness. The rain
had stopped again. Susan went up Second Avenue slowly. Two
blocks from the dive from which she had escaped, she sank down
on a stoop and fainted. IX

THE dash of cold rain drops upon her face and the chill of
moisture soaking through her clothing revived her. Throughout
the whole range of life, whenever we resist we suffer. As
Susan dragged her aching, cold wet body up from that stoop, it
seemed to her that each time she resisted the penalty grew
heavier. Could she have been more wretched had she remained in
that dive? From her first rebellion that drove her out of her
uncle's house had she ever bettered herself by resisting? She
had gone from bad to worse, from worse to worst.

Worst? "This _must_ be the worst!" she thought. "Surely there
can be no lower depth than where I am now." And then she
shuddered and her soul reeled. Had she not thought this at
each shelf of the precipice down which she had been falling?
"Has it a bottom? Is there no bottom?"

Wet through, tired through, she put up her umbrella and forced
herself feebly along. "Where am I going? Why do I not kill
myself? What is it that drives me on and on?"

There came no direct answer to that last question. But up from
those deep vast reservoirs of vitality that seemed sufficient
whatever the drain upon them--up from those reservoirs welled
strength and that unfaltering will to live which breathes upon
the corpse of hope and quickens it. And she had a sense of an
invisible being, a power that had her in charge, a destiny,
walking beside her, holding up her drooping strength, compelling
her toward some goal hidden in the fog and the storm.

At Eighth Street she turned west; at Third Avenue she paused,
waiting for chance to direct her. Was it not like the
maliciousness of fate that in the city whose rarely interrupted
reign of joyous sunshine made her call it the city of the Sun
her critical turn of chance should have fallen in foul weather?
Evidently fate was resolved on a thorough test of her
endurance. In the open square, near the Peter Cooper statue,
stood a huge all-night lunch wagon. She moved toward it, for
she suddenly felt hungry. It was drawn to the curb; a short
flight of ladder steps led to an interior attractive to sight
and smell. She halted at the foot of the steps and looked in.
The only occupant was the man in charge. In a white coat he
was leaning upon the counter, reading a newspaper which lay
flat upon it. His bent head was extensively and roughly
thatched with black hair so thick that to draw a comb through
it would have been all but impossible. As Susan let down her
umbrella and began to ascend, he lifted his head and gave her
a full view of a humorous young face, bushy of eyebrows and
mustache and darkly stained by his beard, close shaven though
it was. He looked like a Spaniard or an Italian, but he was a
black Irishman, one of the West coasters who recall in their
eyes and coloring the wrecking of the Armada.

"Good morning, lady," said he. "Breakfast or supper?"

"Both," replied Susan. "I'm starved."

The air was gratefully warm in the little restaurant on wheels.
The dominant odor was of hot coffee; but that aroma was carried
to a still higher delight by a suggestion of pastry. "The best
thing I've got," said the restaurant man, "is hot corn beef
hash. It's so good I hate to let any of it go. You can have
griddle cakes, too--and coffee, of course."

"Very well," said Susan.

She was ascending upon a wave of reaction from the events of
the night. Her headache had gone. The rain beating upon the
roof seemed musical to her now, in this warm shelter with its
certainty of the food she craved.

The young man was busy at the shiny, compact stove; the odors
of the good things she was presently to have grew stronger and
stronger, stimulating her hunger, bringing joy to her heart and
a smile to her eyes. She wondered at herself. After what she
had passed through, how could she feel thus happy--yes,
positively happy? It seemed to her this was an indication of
a lack in her somewhere--of seriousness, of sensibility, of she
knew not what. She ought to be ashamed of that lack. But she
was not ashamed. She was shedding her troubles like a
child--or like a philosopher.

"Do you like hash?" inquired the restaurant man over his shoulder.

"Just as you're making it," said she. "Dry but not too dry.
Brown but not too brown."

"You don't think you'd like a poached egg on top of it?"

"Exactly what I want!"

"It isn't everybody that can poach an egg," said the restaurant
man. "And it isn't every egg that can be poached. Now, my
eggs are the real thing. And I can poach 'em so you'd think
they was done with one of them poaching machines. I don't have
'em with the yellow on a slab of white. I do it so that the
white's all round the yellow, like in the shell. And I keep
'em tender, too. Did you say one egg or a pair?"

"Two," said Susan.

The dishes were thick, but clean and whole. The hash--"dry but
not too dry, brown but not too brown"--was artistically
arranged on its platter, and the two eggs that adorned its top
were precisely as he had promised. The coffee, boiled with the
milk, was real coffee, too. When the restaurant man had set
these things before her, as she sat expectant on a stool, he
viewed his handiwork with admiring eyes.

"Delmonico couldn't beat it," said he. "No, nor Oscar,
neither. That'll take the tired look out of your face, lady,
and bring the beauty back."

Susan ate slowly, listening to the music of the beating rain.
It was like an oasis, a restful halt between two stretches of
desert journey; she wished to make it as long as possible.
Only those who live exposed to life's buffetings ever learn to
enjoy to the full the great little pleasures of life--the
halcyon pauses in the storms--the few bright rays through the
break in the clouds, the joy of food after hunger, of a bath
after days of privation, of a jest or a smiling face or a kind
word or deed after darkness and bitterness and contempt. She saw
the restaurant man's eyes on her, a curious expression in them.

"What's the matter?" she inquired.

"I was thinking," said he, "how miserable you must have been to
be so happy now."

"Oh, I guess none of us has any too easy a time," said she.

"But it's mighty hard on women. I used to think different,
before I had bad luck and got down to tending this lunch wagon.
But now I understand about a lot of things. It's all very well
for comfortable people to talk about what a man or a woman
ought to do and oughtn't to do. But let 'em be slammed up
against it. They'd sing a different song--wouldn't they?"

"Quite different," said Susan.

The man waved a griddle spoon. "I tell you, we do what we've
got to do. Yes--the thieves and--and--all of us. Some's used
for foundations and some for roofing and some for inside fancy
work and some for outside wall. And some's used for the
rubbish heap. But all's used. They do what they've got to do.
I was a great hand at worrying what I was going to be used for.
But I don't bother about it any more." He began to pour the
griddle cake dough. "I think I'll get there, though," said he
doggedly, as if he expected to be derided for vanity.

"You will," said Susan.

"I'm twenty-nine. But I've been being got ready for something.
They don't chip away at a stone as they have at me without
intending to make some use of it."

"No, indeed," said the girl, hope and faith welling up in her
own heart.

"And what's more, I've stood the chipping. I ain't become
rubbish; I'm still a good stone. That's promising, ain't it?"

"It's a sure sign," declared Susan. Sure for herself, no less
than for him.

The restaurant man took from under the counter several
well-worn schoolbooks. He held them up, looked at Susan and
winked. "Good business--eh?"

She laughed and nodded. He put the books back under the
counter, finished the cakes and served them. As he gave her
more butter he said:

"It ain't the best butter--not by a long shot. But it's
good--as good as you get on the average farm--or better. Did
you ever eat the best butter?"

"I don't know. I've had some that was very good."

"Eighty cents a pound?"

"Mercy, no," exclaimed Susan.

"Awful price, isn't it? But worth the money--yes, sir! Some
time when you've got a little change to spare, go get half a
pound at one of the swell groceries or dairies. And the best
milk, too. Twelve cents a quart. Wait till I get money. I'll
show 'em how to live. I was born in a tenement. Never had
nothing. Rags to wear, and food one notch above a garbage
barrel."

"I know," said Susan.

"But even as a boy I wanted the high-class things. It's
wanting the best that makes a man push his way up."

Another customer came--a keeper of a butcher shop, on his way
to market. Susan finished the cakes, paid the forty cents and
prepared to depart. "I'm looking for a hotel," said she to the
restaurant man, "one where they'll take me in at this time, but
one that's safe not a dive."

"Right across the square there's a Salvation Army shelter--very
good--clean. I Don't know of any other place for a lady."

"There's a hotel on the next corner," put in the butcher,
suspending the violent smacking and sipping which attended his
taking rolls and coffee. "It ain't neither the one thing nor
the other. It's clean and cheap, and they'll let you behave if
you want to."

"That's all I ask," said the girl. "Thank you." And she
departed, after an exchange of friendly glances with the
restaurant man. "I feel lots better," said she.

"It was a good breakfast," replied he.

"That was only part. Good luck!"

"Same to you, lady. Call again. Try my chops."

At the corner the butcher had indicated Susan found the usual
Raines Law hotel, adjunct to a saloon and open to all comers,
however "transient." But she took the butcher's word for it,
engaged a dollar-and-a-half room from the half-asleep clerk,
was shown to it by a colored bellboy who did not bother to wake
up. It was a nice little room with barely space enough for a
bed, a bureau, a stationary washstand, a chair and a small
radiator. As she undressed by the light of a sad gray dawn,
she examined her dress to see how far it needed repair and how
far it might be repaired. She had worn away from Forty-third
Street her cheapest dress because it happened to be of an
inconspicuous blue. It was one of those suits that look fairly
well at a glance on the wax figure in the department store
window, that lose their bloom as quickly as a country bride,
and at the fourth or fifth wearing begin to make frank and
sweeping confession of the cheapness of every bit of the
material and labor that went into them. These suits are
typical of all that poverty compels upon the poor, all that
they in their ignorance and inexperience of values accept
without complaint, fancying they are getting money's worth and
never dreaming they are more extravagant than the most prodigal
of the rich. However, as their poverty gives them no choice,
their ignorance saves them from futilities of angry discontent.
Susan had bought this dress because she had to have another
dress and could not afford to spend more than twelve dollars,
and it had been marked down from twenty-five. She had worn it
in fair weather and had contrived to keep it looking pretty
well. But this rain had finished it quite. Thereafter, until
she could get another dress, she must expect to be classed as
poor and seedy--therefore, on the way toward deeper
poverty--therefore, an object of pity and of prey. If she went
into a shop, she would be treated insultingly by the shopgirls,
despising her as a poor creature like themselves. If a man
approached her, he would calculate upon getting her very cheap
because a girl in such a costume could not have been in the
habit of receiving any great sum. And if she went with him, he
would treat her with far less consideration than if she had
been about the same business in smarter attire. She spread the
dress on bureau and chair, smoothing it, wiping the mud stains
from it. She washed out her stockings at the stationary stand,
got them as dry as her remarkably strong hands could wring
them, hung them on a rung of the chair near the hot little
radiator. She cleaned her boots and overshoes with an old
newspaper she found in a drawer, and wet at the washstand. She
took her hat to pieces and made it over into something that
looked almost fresh enough to be new. Then, ready for bed, she
got the office of the hotel on the telephone and left a call
for half-past nine o'clock--three hours and a half away. When
she was throwing up the window, she glanced into the street.

The rain had once more ceased. Through the gray dimness the
men and women, boys and girls, on the way to the factories and
shops for the day's work, were streaming past in funereal
procession. Some of the young ones were lively. But the mass
was sullen and dreary. Bodies wrecked or rapidly wrecking by
ignorance of hygiene, by the foul air and foul food of the
tenements, by the monotonous toil of factory and shop--mindless
toil--toil that took away mind and put in its place a distaste
for all improvement--toil of the factories that distorted the
body and enveloped the soul in sodden stupidity--toil of the
shops that meant breathing bad air all day long, meant stooped
shoulders and varicose veins in the legs and the arches of the
insteps broken down, meant dull eyes, bad skin, female
complaints, meant the breeding of desires for the luxury the
shops display, the breeding of envy and servility toward those
able to buy these luxuries.

Susan lingered, fascinated by this exhibit of the price to the
many of civilization for the few. Work? Never! Not any more
than she would. "Work" in a dive! Work--either branch of it,
factory and shop or dive meant the sale of all the body and all
the soul; her profession--at least as she practiced it--meant
that perhaps she could buy with part of body and part of soul
the privilege of keeping the rest of both for her own self. If
she had stayed on at work from the beginning in Cincinnati,
where would she be now? Living in some stinking tenement hole,
with hope dead. And how would she be looking? As dull of eye
as the rest, as pasty and mottled of skin, as ready for any
chance disease. Work? Never! Never! "Not at anything that'd
degrade me more than this life. Yes--more." And she lifted
her head defiantly. To her hunger Life was thus far offering
only a plate of rotten apples; it was difficult to choose among
them--but there was choice.

She was awakened by the telephone bell; and it kept on ringing
until she got up and spoke to the office through the sender.
Never had she so craved sleep; and her mental and physical
contentment of three hours and a half before had been succeeded
by headache, a general soreness, a horrible attack of the
blues. She grew somewhat better, however, as she washed first
in hot water, then in cold at the stationary stand which was
quite as efficient if not so luxurious as a bathtub. She
dressed in a rush, but not so hurriedly that she failed to make
the best toilet the circumstances permitted. Her hair went up
unusually well; the dress did not look so badly as she had
feared it would. "As it's a nasty day," she reflected, "it won't
do me so much damage. My hat and my boots will make them give
me the benefit of the doubt and think I'm saving my good clothes."

She passed through the office at five minutes to ten. When she
reached Lange's winter garden, its clock said ten minutes past
ten, but she knew it must be fast. Only one of the four
musicians had arrived--the man who played the drums, cymbals,
triangle and xylophone--a fat, discouraged old man who knew how
easily he could be replaced. Neither Lange nor his wife had
come; her original friend, the Austrian waiter, was wiping off
tables and cleaning match stands. He welcomed her with a smile
of delight that showed how few teeth remained in the front of
his mouth and how deeply yellow they were. But Susan saw only
his eyes--and the kind heart that looked through them.

"Maybe you haven't had breakfast already?" he suggested.

"I'm not hungry, thank you."

"Perhaps some coffee--yes?"

Susan thought the coffee would make her feel better. So he
brought it--Vienna fashion--an open china pot full of strong,
deliciously aromatic black coffee, a jug of milk with whipped
white of egg on top, a basket of small sweet rolls powdered
with sugar and caraway seed. She ate one of the rolls, drank
the coffee. Before she had finished, the waiter stood beaming
before her and said:

"A cigarette--yes?"

"Oh, no," replied Susan, a little sadly.

"But yes," urged he. "It isn't against the rules. The boss's
wife smokes. Many ladies who come here do--real ladies. It is
the custom in Europe. Why not?" And he produced a box of
cigarettes and put it on the table. Susan lit one of them and
once more with supreme physical content came a cheerfulness
that put color and sprightliness into the flowers of hope. And
the sun had won its battle with the storm; the storm was in
retreat. Sunshine was streaming in at the windows, into her
heart. The waiter paused in his work now and then to enjoy
himself in contemplating the charming picture she made. She
was thinking of what the wagon restaurant man had said. Yes,
Life had been chipping away at her; but she had remained good
stone, had not become rubbish.

About half-past ten Lange came down from his flat which was
overhead. He inspected her by daylight and finding that his
electric light impressions were not delusion was highly pleased
with her. He refused to allow her to pay for the coffee.
"Johann!" he called, and the leader of the orchestra approached
and made a respectful bow to his employer. He had a solemn
pompous air and the usual pompadour. He and Susan plunged into
the music question, found that the only song they both knew was
Tosti's "Good Bye."

"That'll do to try," said Lange. "Begin!"

And after a little tuning and voice testing, Susan sang the
"Good Bye" with full orchestra accompaniment. It was not good;
it was not even pretty good; but it was not bad. "You'll do
all right," said Lange. "You can stay. Now, you and Johann
fix up some songs and get ready for tonight." And he turned
away to buy supplies for restaurant and bar.

Johann, deeply sentimental by nature, was much pleased with
Susan's contralto. "You do not know how to sing," said he.
"You sing in your throat and you've got all the faults of
parlor singers. But the voice is there--and much
expressiveness--much temperament. Also, you have
intelligence--and that will make a very little voice
go a great way."

Before proceeding any further with the rehearsal, he took Susan
up to a shop where sheet music was sold and they selected three
simple songs: "Gipsy Queen," "Star of My Life" and "Love in
Dreams." They were to try "Gipsy Queen" that night, with "Good
Bye" and, if the applause should compel, "Suwanee River."

When they were back at the restaurant Susan seated herself in
a quiet corner and proceeded to learn the words of the song and
to get some notion of the tune.

She had lunch with Mr. and Mrs. Lange and Katy, whose hair was
very golden indeed and whose voice and manner proclaimed the
Bowery and its vaudeville stage. She began by being grand with
Susan, but had far too good a heart and far too sensible a
nature to keep up long. It takes more vanity, more solemn
stupidity and more leisure than plain people have time for, to
maintain the force of fake dignity. Before lunch was over it
was Katy and Lorna; and Katy was distressed that her duties at
the theater made it impossible for her to stay and help Lorna
with the song.

At the afternoon rehearsal Susan distinguished herself. To
permit business in the restaurant and the rehearsal at the same
time, there was a curtain to divide the big room into two
unequal parts. When Susan sang her song through for the first
time complete, the men smoking and drinking on the other side
of the curtain burst into applause. Johann shook hands with
Susan, shook hands again, kissed her hand, patted her shoulder.
But in the evening things did not go so well.

Susan, badly frightened, got away from the orchestra, lagged
when it speeded to catch up with her. She made a pretty and
engaging figure in the costume, low in the neck and ending at
the knees. Her face and shoulders, her arms and legs, the
lines of her slender, rounded body made a success. But they
barely saved her from being laughed at. When she finished,
there was no applause so no necessity for an encore. She ran
upstairs, and, with nerves all a-quiver, hid herself in the
little room she and Katy were to share. Until she failed she
did not realize how much she had staked upon this venture. But
now she knew; and it seemed to her that her only future was the
streets. Again her chance had come; again she had thrown it
away. If there were anything in her--anything but mere vain
hopes--that could not have occurred. In her plight anyone with
a spark of the divinity that achieves success would have
scored. "I belong in the streets," said she. Before dinner
she had gone out and had bought a ninety-five cent night-dress
and some toilet articles. These she now bundled together again.
She changed to her street dress; she stole down the stairs.

She was out at the side door, she was flying through the side
street toward the Bowery. "Hi!" shouted someone behind her.
"Where you going?" And overtaking her came her staunch friend
Albert, the waiter. Feeling that she must need sympathy and
encouragement, he had slipped away from his duties to go up to
her. He had reached the hall in time to see what she was about
and had darted bareheaded after her.

"Where you going?" he repeated, excitedly.

A crowd began to gather. "Oh, good-by," she cried. "I'm
getting out before I'm told to go--that's all. I made a
failure. Thank you, Albert." She put out her hand; she was
still moving and looking in the direction of the Bowery.

"Now you mustn't be foolish,", said he, holding on tightly to her
hand. "The boss says it's all right. Tomorrow you do better."

"I'd never dare try again."

"Tomorrow makes everything all right. You mustn't act like a
baby. The first time Katy tried, they yelled her off the
stage. Now she gets eleven a week. Come back right away with
me. The boss'd be mad if you won't. You ain't acting right,
Miss Lorna. I didn't think you was such a fool."

He had her attention now. Unmindful of the little crowd they
had gathered, they stood there discussing until to save Albert
from pneumonia she returned with him. He saw her started up
the stairs, then ventured to take his eye off her long enough
to put his head into the winter garden and send a waiter for
Lange. He stood guard until Lange came and was on his way to her.

The next evening, a Saturday, before a crowded house she sang
well, as well as she had ever sung in her life--sang well enough
to give her beauty of face and figure, her sweetness, her charm
the opportunity to win a success. She had to come back and
sing "Suwanee River." She had to come for a second encore;
and, flushed with her victory over her timidity, she sang
Tosti's sad cry of everlasting farewell with all the tenderness
there was in her. That song exactly fitted her passionate,
melancholy voice; its words harmonized with the deep sadness
that was her real self, that is the real self of every
sensitive soul this world has ever tried with its exquisite
torments for flesh and spirit. The tears that cannot be shed
were in her voice, in her face, as she stood there, with her
violet-gray eyes straining into vacancy. But the men and the
women shed tears; and when she moved, breaking the spell of
silence, they not only applauded, they cheered.

The news quickly spread that at Lange's there was a girl singer
worth hearing and still more worth looking at. And Lange had
his opportunity to arrive.

But several things stood in his way, things a man of far more
intelligence would have found it hard to overcome.

Like nearly all saloon-keepers, he was serf to a brewery; and
the particular brewery whose beer his mortgage compelled
him to push did not make a beer that could be pushed. People
complained that it had a disagreeably bitter aftertaste. In
the second place, Mrs. Lange was a born sitter. She had
married to rest--and she was resting. She was always piled
upon a chair. Thus, she was not an aid but a hindrance, an
encourager of the help in laziness and slovenliness. Again,
the cooking was distinctly bad; the only really good thing the
house served was coffee, and that was good only in the
mornings. Finally, Lange was a saver by nature and not a
spreader. He could hold tightly to any money he closed his
stubby fingers upon; he did not know how to plant money and
make it grow, but only how to hoard.

Thus it came to pass that, after the first spurt, the business
fell back to about where it had been before Susan came.
Albert, the Austrian waiter, explained to Susan why it was that
her popularity did the house apparently so little
good--explained with truth where she suspected kind-hearted
plotting, that she had arrested its latterly swift-downward
slide. She was glad to hear what he had to say, as it was most
pleasant to her vanity; but she could not get over the
depression of the central fact--she was not making the sort of
business to justify asking Lange for more than board and lodging;
she was not in the way of making the money that was each
day more necessary, as her little store dwindled.

The question of getting money to live on is usually dismissed
in a princely way by writers about human life. It is in
reality, except with the few rich, the ever-present
question--as ever-present as the necessity of breathing--and it
is not, like breathing, a matter settled automatically. It
dominates thought; it determines action. To leave it out of
account ever, in writing a human history, is to misrepresent
and distort as utterly as would a portrait painter who
neglected to give his subject eyes, or a head, even. With the
overwhelming mass of us, money is at all times all our lives
long the paramount question--for to be without it is
destruction worse than death, and we are almost all perilously
near to being without it. Thus, airily to pass judgment upon
men and women as to their doings in getting money for
necessaries, for what the compulsion of custom and habit has
made necessaries to them--airily to judge them for their doings
in such dire straits is like sitting calmly on shore and
criticizing the conduct of passengers and sailors in a
stormbeset sinking ship. It is one of the favorite pastimes of
the comfortable classes; it makes an excellent impression as to
one's virtue upon one's audience; it gives us a pleasing sense
of superior delicacy and humor. But it is none the less mean
and ridiculous. Instead of condemnation, the world needs to
bestir itself to remove the stupid and cruel creatures that
make evil conduct necessary; for can anyone, not a prig, say
that the small part of the human race that does well does so
because it is naturally better than the large part that does ill?

Spring was slow in opening. Susan's one dress was in a
deplorable state. The lining hung in rags. The never good
material was stretched out of shape, was frayed and worn gray
in spots, was beyond being made up as presentable by the most
careful pressing and cleaning. She had been forced to buy a
hat, shoes, underclothes. She had only three dollars and a few
cents left, and she simply did not dare lay it all out in dress
materials. Yet, less than all would not be enough; all would
not be enough.

Lange had from time to time more than hinted at the
opportunities she was having as a public singer in his hall.
But Susan, for all her experience, had remained one of those
upon whom such opportunities must be thrust if they are to be
accepted.

So long as she had food and shelter, she could not make
advances; she could not even go so far as passive acquiescence.
She knew she was again violating the fundamental canon of
success; whatever one's business, do it thoroughly if at all.
But she could not overcome her temperament which had at this
feeble and false opportunity at once resented itself. She knew
perfectly that therein was the whole cause of her failure to
make the success she ought to have made when she came up from
the tenements, and again when she fell into the clutches of
Freddie Palmer. But it is one thing to know; it is another
thing to do. Susan ignored the attempts of the men; she
pretended not to understand Lange when they set him on to
intercede with her for them. She saw that she was once more
drifting to disaster--and that she had not long to drift. She
was exasperated against herself; she was disgusted with
herself. But she drifted on.

Growing seedier looking every day, she waited, defying the
plain teachings of experience. She even thought seriously of
going to work. But the situation in that direction remained
unchanged. She was seeing things, the reasons for things, more
clearly now, as experience developed her mind. She felt that
to get on in respectability she ought to have been either more
or less educated. If she had been used from birth to
conditions but a step removed from savagery, she might have
been content with what offered, might even have felt that she
was rising. Or if she had been bred to a good trade, and
educated only to the point where her small earnings could have
satisfied her desires, then she might have got along in
respectability. But she had been bred a "lady"; a Chinese
woman whose feet have been bound from babyhood until her
fifteenth or sixteenth year--how long it would be, after her
feet were freed, before she could learn to walk at all!--and
would she ever be able to learn to walk well?

What is luxury for one is squalor for another; what is
elevation for one degrades another. In respectability she
could not earn what was barest necessity for her--what she was
now getting at Lange's--decent shelter, passable food. Ejected
from her own class that shelters its women and brings them up
in unfitness for the unsheltered life, she was dropping as all
such women must and do drop--was going down, down,
down--striking on this ledge and that, and rebounding to resume
her ever downward course.

She saw her own plight only too vividly. Those whose outward
and inward lives are wide apart get a strong sense of dual
personality. It was thus with Susan. There were times when
she could not believe in the reality of her external life.

She often glanced through the columns on columns, pages on
pages of "want ads" in the papers--not with the idea of
answering them, for she had served her apprenticeship at that,
but simply to force herself to realize vividly just how matters
stood with her. Those columns and pages of closely printed
offerings of work! Dreary tasks, all of them--tasks devoid of
interest, of personal sense of usefulness, tasks simply to keep
degrading soul in degenerating body, tasks performed in filthy
factories, in foul-smelling workrooms and shops, in unhealthful
surroundings. And this, throughout civilization, was the
"honest work" so praised--by all who don't do it, but live
pleasantly by making others do it. Wasn't there something in
the ideas of Etta's father, old Tom Brashear? Couldn't
sensible, really loving people devise some way of making most
tasks less repulsive, of lessening the burdens of those tasks
that couldn't be anything but repulsive? Was this stupid
system, so cruel, so crushing, and producing at the top such
absurd results as flashy, insolent autos and silly palaces and
overfed, overdressed women, and dogs in jeweled collars, and
babies of wealth brought up by low menials--was this system
really the best?

"If they'd stop canting about `honest work' they might begin to
get somewhere."

In the effort to prevent her downward drop from beginning again
she searched all the occupations open to her. She could not
find one that would not have meant only the most visionary
prospect of some slight remote advancement, and the certain and
speedy destruction of what she now realized was her chief asset
and hope--her personal appearance. And she resolved that she
would not even endanger it ever again. The largest part of the
little capital she took away from Forty-third Street had gone
to a dentist who put in several fillings of her back teeth.
She had learned to value every charm--hair, teeth, eyes, skin,
figure, hands. She watched over them all, because she felt
that when her day finally came--and come it would, she never
allowed long to doubt--she must be ready to enter fully into
her own. Her day! The day when fate should change the life her
outward self would be compelled to live, would bring it into
harmony with the life of inward self--the self she could control.

Katy had struck up a friendship at once profitable and
sentimental with her stage manager. She often stayed out all
night. On one of these nights Susan, alone in the tiny room
and asleep, was roused by feeling hands upon her. She started
up half awake and screamed.

"Sh!" came in Lange's voice. "It's me."

Susan had latterly observed sly attempts on his part to make
advances without his wife and daughter's suspecting; but she
had thought her way of quietly ignoring was effective. "You
must go," she whispered. "Mrs. Lange must have heard."

"I had to come," said he hoarsely, a mere voice in the
darkness. "I can't hold out no longer without you, Lorna."

"Go--go," urged Susan.

But it was too late. In the doorway, candle in hand, appeared
Mrs. Lange. Despite her efforts at "dressiness" she was in her
best hour homely and nearly shapeless. In night dress and
released from corsets she was hideous and monstrous. "I
thought so!" she shrieked. "I thought so!"

"I heard a burglar, mother," whined Lange, an abject and
guilty figure.

"Shut your mouth, you loafer!" shrieked Mrs. Lange. And she
turned to Susan. "You gutter hussy, get on your clothes and
clear out!"

"But--Mrs. Lange----" began Susan.

"Clear out!" she shouted, opening the outer hall. "Dress
mighty damn quick and clear out!"

"Mother, you'll wake the people upstairs," pleaded Lange--and
Susan had never before realized how afraid of his wife the
little man was. "For God's sake, listen to sense."

"After I've thrown you--into the streets," cried his wife,
beside herself with jealous fury. "Get dressed, I tell you!"
she shouted at Susan.

And the girl hurried into her clothes, making no further
attempt to speak. She knew that to plead and to explain would
be useless; even if Mrs. Lange believed, still she would drive
from the house the temptation to her husband. Lange, in a
quaking, cowardly whine, begged his wife to be sensible and
believe his burglar story. But with each half-dozen words he
uttered, she interrupted to hurl obscene epithets at him or at
Susan. The tenants of the upstairs flats came down. She told
her wrongs to a dozen half-clad men, women and children; they
took her side at once, and with the women leading showered vile
insults upon Susan. The uproar was rising, rising. Lange
cowered in a corner, crying bitterly like a whipped child.
Susan, only partly dressed, caught up her hat and rushed into
the hall. Several women struck at her as she passed. She
stumbled on the stairs, almost fell headlong. With the most
frightful words in tenement house vocabulary pursuing her she
fled into the street, and did not pause until she was within a
few yards of the Bowery. There she sat down on a doorstep and,
half-crazed by the horror of her sudden downfall, laced her
shoes and buttoned her blouse and put on her hat with fumbling,
shaking fingers. It had all happened so quickly that she would
have thought she was dreaming but for the cold night air and
the dingy waste of the Bowery with the streetwalkers and
drunken bums strolling along under the elevated tracks. She
had trifled with the opportunity too long. It had flown in
disgust, dislodging her as it took flight. If she would be
over nice and critical, would hesitate to take the only upward
path fate saw fit to offer, then--let her seek the bottom!
Susan peered down, and shuddered.

She went into the saloon at the corner, into the little back
room. She poured down drink after drink of the frightful
poison sold as whiskey with the permission of a government
owned by every interest that can make big money out of a race
of free men and so can afford to pay big bribes. It is
characteristic of this poison of the saloon of the tenement
quarter that it produces in anyone who drinks it a species of
quick insanity, of immediate degeneration--a desire to commit
crime, to do degraded acts. Within an hour of Susan's being
thrown into the streets, no one would have recognized her. She
had been drinking, had been treating the two faded but young
and decently dressed streetwalkers who sat at another table.
The three, fired and maddened by the poison, were amusing
themselves and two young men as recklessly intoxicated as they.
Susan, in an attitude she had seen often enough but had never
dreamed of taking, was laughing wildly at a coarse song, was
standing up, skirts caught high and body swaying in drunken
rhythm as she led the chorus.

When the barkeeper announced closing time, one of the young men
said to her:

"Which way?"

"To hell," laughed she. "I've been thrown out everywhere else.
Want to go along?"

"I'll never desert a perfect lady," replied he. X

SHE was like one who has fallen bleeding and broken into a
cave; who after a time gathers himself together and crawls
toward a faint and far distant gleam of light; who suddenly
sees the light no more and at the same instant lurches forward
and down into a deeper chasm.

Occasionally sheer exhaustion of nerves made it impossible for
her to drink herself again into apathy before the effects of
the last doses of the poison had worn off. In these intervals
of partial awakening--she never permitted them to lengthen out,
as such sensation as she had was of one
falling--falling--through empty space--with whirling brain and
strange sounds in the ears and strange distorted sights or
hallucinations before the eyes--falling
down--down--whither?--to how great a depth?--or was there no
bottom, but simply presently a plunging on down into the black
of death's bottomless oblivion?

Drink--always drink. Yet in every other way she took care of
her health--a strange mingling of prudence and subtle hope with
recklessness and frank despair. All her refinement, baffled in
the moral ways, concentrated upon the physical. She would be
neat and well dressed; she would not let herself be seized of
the diseases on the pariah in those regions--the diseases
through dirt and ignorance and indifference.

In the regions she now frequented recklessness was the keynote.
There was the hilarity of the doomed; there was the cynical or
stolid indifference to heat or cold, to rain or shine, to rags,
to filth, to jail, to ejection for nonpayment of rent, to
insult of word or blow. The fire engines--the ambulance--the
patrol wagon--the city dead wagon--these were all ever passing
and repassing through those swarming streets. It was the
vastest, the most populous tenement area of the city. Its
inhabitants represented the common lot--for it is the common
lot of the overwhelming mass of mankind to live near to
nakedness, to shelterlessness, to starvation, without ever
being quite naked or quite roofless or quite starved. The
masses are eager for the necessities; the classes are eager for
the comforts and luxuries. The masses are ignorant; the
classes are intelligent--or, at least, shrewd. The unconscious
and inevitable exploitation of the masses by the classes
automatically and of necessity stops just short of the
catastrophe point--for the masses must have enough to give them
the strength to work and reproduce. To go down through the
social system as had Susan from her original place well up
among the classes is like descending from the beautiful dining
room of the palace where the meat is served in taste and
refinement upon costly dishes by well mannered servants to
attractively dressed people--descending along the various stages
of the preparation of the meat, at each stage less of
refinement and more of coarseness, until one at last arrives at
the slaughter pen. The shambles, stinking and reeking blood
and filth! The shambles, with hideous groan or shriek, or more
hideous silent look of agony! The shambles of society where
the beauty and grace and charm of civilization are created out
of noisome sweat and savage toil, out of the health and
strength of men and women and children, out of their ground up
bodies, out of their ground up souls. Susan knew those regions
well. She had no theories about them, no resentment against
the fortunate classes, no notion that any other or better
system might be possible, any other or better life for the
masses. She simply accepted life as she found it, lived it as
best she could.

Throughout the masses of mankind life is sustained by
illusions--illusions of a better lot tomorrow, illusions of a
heaven beyond a grave, where the nightmare, life in the body,
will end and the reality, life in the spirit, will begin. She
could not join the throngs moving toward church and synagogue
to indulge in their dream that the present was a dream from
which death would be a joyful awakening. She alternately
pitied and envied them. She had her own dream that this dream,
the present, would end in a joyful awakening to success and
freedom and light and beauty. She admitted to herself that the
dream was probably an illusion, like that of the pious throngs.
But she was as unreasonably tenacious of her dream as they were
of theirs. She dreamed it because she was a human being--and
to be human means to hope, and to hope means to dream of a
brighter future here or hereafter, or both here and hereafter.
The earth is peopled with dreamers; she was but one of them.
The last thought of despair as the black earth closes is a
hope, perhaps the most colossal of hope's delusions, that there
will be escape in the grave.

There is the time when we hope and know it and believe in it.
There is the time when we hope and know it but have ceased to
believe in it. There is the time when we hope, believing that
we have altogether ceased to hope. That time had come for
Susan. She seemed to think about the present. She moved about
like a sleepwalker.

What women did she know--what men? She only dimly remembered
from day to day--from hour to hour. Blurred faces passed
before her, blurred voices sounded in her ears, blurred
personalities touched hers. It was like the jostling of a huge
crowd in night streets. A vague sense of buffetings--of rude
contacts--of momentary sensations of pain, of shame, of
disgust, all blunted and soon forgotten.

In estimating suffering, physical or mental, to fail to take
into account a more important factor--the merciful paralysis or
partial paralysis of any center of sensibility--that is
insistently assaulted.

She no longer had headaches or nausea after drinking deeply.
And where formerly it had taken many stiff doses of liquor to
get her into the state of recklessness or of indifference, she
was now able to put herself into the mood in which life was
endurable with two or three drinks, often with only one. The
most marked change was that never by any chance did she become
gay; the sky over her life was steadily gray--gray or black, to
gray again--never lighter.

How far she had fallen! But swift descent or gradual, she had
adapted herself--had, in fact, learned by much experience of
disaster to mitigate the calamities, to have something to keep
a certain deep-lying self of selfs intact--unaffected by what
she had been forced to undergo. It seemed to her that if she
could get the chance--or could cure herself of the blindness
which was always preventing her from seeing and seizing the
chance that doubtless offered again and again--she could shed
the surface her mode of life had formed over her and would find
underneath a new real surface, stronger, sightly, better able
to bear--like the skin that forms beneath the healing wound.

In these tenements, as in all tenements of all degrees, she and
the others of her class were fiercely resented by the heads of
families where there was any hope left to impel a striving
upward. She had the best furnished room in the tenement. She
was the best dressed woman--a marked and instantly recognizable
figure because of her neat and finer clothes. Her profession
kept alive and active the instincts for care of the person that
either did not exist or were momentary and feeble in the
respectable women. The slovenliness, the scurrilousness of
even the wives and daughters of the well-to-do and the rich of
that region would not have been tolerated in any but the lowest
strata of her profession, hardly even in those sought by men of
the laboring class. Also, the deep horror of disease, which
her intelligence never for an instant permitted to relax its
hold, made her particular and careful when in other
circumstances drink might have reduced her to squalor. She
spent all her leisure time--for she no longer read--in the care
of her person.

She was watched with frightened, yet longing and curious, eyes
by all the girls who were at work. The mothers hated her; many
of them spat upon the ground after she had passed. It was a
heart-breaking struggle, that of these mothers to save their
daughters, not from prostitution, not from living with men
outside marriage, not from moral danger, but from the practical
danger, the danger of bringing into the world children with no
father to help feed and clothe them. In the opinion of these
people--an opinion often frankly expressed, rarely concealed
with any but the thinnest hypocrisy--the life of prostitution
was not so bad. Did the life of virtue offer any attractive
alternative? Whether a woman was "bad" or "good," she must
live in travail and die in squalor to be buried in or near the
Potter's Field. But if the girl still living at home were not
"good," that would mean a baby to be taken care of, would mean
the girl herself not a contributor to the family support but a
double burden. And if she went into prostitution, would her
family get the benefit? No.

The mothers made little effort to save their sons; they
concentrated on the daughters. It was pitiful to see how in
their ignorance they were unaware of the strongest forces
working against them. The talk of all this motley humanity--of
"good" no less than "bad" women, of steady workingmen, of
political heelers, thieves and bums and runners for dives--was
frankly, often hideously, obscene. The jammed together way of
living made modesty impossible, or scantest decency--made the
pictures of it among the aspiring few, usually for the benefit
of religion or charitable visitors, a pitiful, grotesque
hypocrisy. Indeed, the prostitute class was the highest in
this respect. The streetwalkers, those who prospered, had
better masters, learned something about the pleasures and
charms of privacy, also had more leisure in which to think, in
however crude a way, about the refinements of life, and more
money with which to practice those refinements. The boys from
the earliest age were on terms of licentious freedom with the
girls. The favorite children's games, often played in the open
street with the elders looking on and laughing, were sex games.
The very babies used foul language--that is, used the language
they learned both at home and in the street. It was primitive
man; Susan was at the foundation of the world.

To speak of the conditions there as a product of civilization
is to show ignorance of the history of our race, is to fancy
that we are civilized today, when in fact we
are--historically--in a turbulent and painful period of
transition from a better yesterday toward a tomorrow in which
life will be worth living as it never has been before in all
the ages of duration. In this today of movement toward
civilization which began with the discovery of iron and will
end when we shall have discovered how to use for the benefit of
all the main forces of nature--in this today of agitation
incident to journeying, we are in some respects better off, in
other respects worse off, than the race was ten or fifteen
thousand years ago. We have lost much of the freedom that was
ours before the rise of governments and ruling classes; we have
gained much--not so much as the ignorant and the unthinking and
the uneducated imagine, but still much. In the end we which
means the masses of us--will gain infinitely. But gain or loss
has not been in so-called morality. There is not a virtue that
has not existed from time ages before record. Not a vice which
is shallowly called "effete" or the "product of
overcivilization," but originated before man was man.

To speak of the conditions in which Susan Lenox now lived as
savagery is to misuse the word. Every transitional stage is
accompanied by a disintegration. Savagery was a settled state
in which every man and every woman had his or her fixed
position, settled duties and rights. With the downfall of
savagery with the beginning of the journey toward that hope of
tomorrow, civilization, everything in the relations of men with
men and men with women, became unsettled. Such social systems
as the world has known since have all been makeshift and
temporary--like our social systems of today, like the moral and
extinct codes rising and sinking in power over a vast multitude
of emigrants moving from a distant abandoned home toward a
distant promised land and forced to live as best they can in
the interval. In the historic day's journey of perhaps fifteen
thousand years our present time is but a brief second. In that
second there has come a breaking up of the makeshift
organization which long served the working multitudes fairly
well. The result is an anarchy in which the strong oppress the
weak, in which the masses are being crushed by the burdens
imposed upon them by the classes. And in that particular part
of the human race en route into which fate had flung Susan
Lenox conditions not of savagery but of primitive chaos were
prevailing. A large part of the population lived off the
unhappy workers by prostitution, by thieving, by petty
swindling, by politics, by the various devices in coarse, crude
and small imitation of the devices employed by the ruling
classes. And these petty parasites imitated the big parasites
in their ways of spending their dubiously got gains. To have
a "good time" was the ideal here as in idle Fifth Avenue; and
the notions of a "good time" in vogue in the two opposite
quarters differed in degree rather than in kind.

Nothing to think about but the appetites and their vices.
Nothing to hope for but the next carouse. Susan had brought
down with her from above one desire unknown to her associates
and neighbors--the desire to forget. If she could only forget!
If the poison would not wear off at times!

She could not quite forget. And to be unable to forget is to
remember--and to remember is to long--and to long is to hope.

Several times she heard of Freddie Palmer. Twice she chanced
upon his name in the newspaper--an incidental reference to him
in connection with local politics. The other times were when
men talking together in the drinking places frequented by both
sexes spoke of him as a minor power in the organization. Each
time she got a sense of her remoteness, of her security. Once
she passed in Grand Street a detective she had often seen with
him in Considine's at Broadway and Forty-second. The "bull"
looked sharply at her. Her heart stood still. But he went on
without recognizing her. The sharp glance had been simply that
official expression of see-all and know-all which is mere
formality, part of the official livery, otherwise meaningless.
However, it is not to that detective's discredit that he failed to
recognize her. She had adapted herself to her changed surroundings.

Because she was of a different and higher class, and because
she picked and chose her company, even when drink had beclouded
her senses and instinct alone remained on drowsy guard, she
prospered despite her indifference. For that region had its
aristocracy of rich merchants, tenement-owners, politicians
whose sons, close imitators of the uptown aristocracies in
manners and dress, spent money freely in the amusements that
attract nearly all young men everywhere. Susan made almost as
much as she could have made in the more renowned quarters of
the town. And presently she was able to move into a tenement
which, except for two workingmen's families of a better class,
was given over entirely to fast women. It was much better
kept, much cleaner, much better furnished than the tenements
for workers chiefly; they could not afford decencies, much less
luxuries. All that sort of thing was, for the neighborhood,
concentrated in the saloons, the dance halls, the fast houses
and the fast flats.

Her walks in Grand Street and the Bowery, repelling and
capricious though she was with her alternating moods of cold
moroseness and sardonic and mocking gayety, were bringing her
in a good sum of money for that region. Sometimes as much as
twenty dollars a week, rarely less than twelve or fifteen. And
despite her drinking and her freehandedness with her
fellow-professionals less fortunate and with the street beggars
and for tenement charities, she had in her stockings a capital
of thirty-one dollars.

She avoided the tough places, the hang-outs of the gangs. She
rarely went alone into the streets at night--and the afternoons
were, luckily, best for business as well as for safety. She
made no friends and therefore no enemies. Without meaning to
do so and without realizing that she did so, she held herself
aloof without haughtiness through sense of loneliness, not at
all through sense of superiority. Had it not been for her
scarlet lips, a far more marked sign in that region than
anywhere uptown, she would have passed in the street for a more
or less respectable woman--not thoroughly respectable; she was
too well dressed, too intelligently cared for to seem the good
working girl.

On one of the few nights when she lingered in the little back
room of the saloon a few doors away at the corner, as she
entered the dark passageway of the tenement, strong fingers
closed upon her throat and she was borne to the floor. She
knew at once that she was in the clutch of one of those terrors
of tenement fast women, the lobbygows--men who live by lying in
wait in the darkness to seize and rob the lonely, friendless
fast woman. She struggled--and she was anything but weak. But
not a sound could escape from her tight-pressed throat. Soon
she became unconscious.

One of the workingmen, returning drunk from the meeting of the
union, in the corner saloon, stumbled over her, gave her a kick
in his anger. This roused her; she uttered a faint cry.
"Thought it was a man," mumbled he, dragging her to a sitting
position. He struck a match. "Oh--it's you! Don't make any
noise. If my old woman came out, she'd kill us both."

"Never mind me," said Susan. "I was only stunned."

"Oh, I thought it was the booze. They say you hit it
something fierce."

"No--a lobbygow." And she felt for her stockings. They were
torn away from her garters. Her bosom also was bare, for the
lobbygow had searched there, also.

"How much did he get?"

"About thirty-five."

"The hell he did! Want me to call a cop?"

"No," replied Susan, who was on her feet again. "What's the use?"

"Those damn cops!" cursed the workingman. "They'd probably pinch
you--or both of us. Ten to one the lobbygows divide with them."

"I didn't mean that," said Susan. The police were most
friendly and most kind to her. She was understanding the ways
of the world better now, and appreciated that the police
themselves were part of the same vast system of tyranny and
robbery that was compelling her. The police made her pay
because they dared not refuse to be collectors. They bound
whom the mysterious invisible power compelled them to bind;
they loosed whom that same power bade them loose. She had no
quarrel with the police, who protected her from far worse
oppressions and oppressors than that to which they subjected
her. And if they tolerated lobbygows and divided with them, it
was because the overshadowing power ordained it so.

"Needn't be afraid I'll blow to the cop," said the drunken
artisan. "You can damn the cops all you please to me. They
make New York worse than Russia."

"I guess they do the best they can--like everybody else," said
the girl wearily.

"I'll help you upstairs."

"No, thank you," said she. Not that she did not need help; but
she wished no disagreeable scene with the workingman's wife who
might open the door as they passed his family's flat.

She went upstairs, the man waiting below until she should be
safe--and out of the way. She staggered into her room,
tottered to the bed, fell upon it. A girl named Clara, who
lived across the hall, was sitting in a rocking-chair in a
nightgown, reading a Bertha Clay novel and smoking a cigarette.
She glanced up, was arrested by the strange look in Susan's eyes.

"Hello--been hitting the pipe, I see," said she. "Down in
Gussie's room?"

"No. A lobbygow," said Susan.

"Did he get much?"

"About thirty-five."

"The----!" cried Clara. "I'll bet it was Gussie's fellow.
I've suspected him. Him and her stay in, hitting the pipe all
the time. That costs money, and she hasn't been out for I
don't know how long. Let's go down there and raise hell."

"What's the use?" said Susan.

"You ought to 'a' put it in the savings bank. That's what I
do--when I have anything. Then, when I'm robbed, they only get
what I've just made. Last time, they didn't get nothing--but
me." And she laughed. Her teeth were good in front, but out
on one side and beginning to be discolored on the other. "How
long had you been saving?"

"Nearly six months."

"Gee! _Isn't_ that hell!" Presently she laughed. "Six months'
work and only thirty-five to show for it. Guess you're about
as poor at hiving it up as I am. I give it to that loafer I
live with. You give it away to anybody that wants a stake.
Well--what's the diff? It all goes."

"Give me a cigarette," said Susan, sitting up and inspecting
the bruises on her bosom and legs. "And get that bottle of
whiskey from under the soiled clothes in the bottom of the
washstand."

"It _is_ something to celebrate, isn't it?" said Clara. "My
fellow's gone to his club tonight, so I didn't go out. I never
do any more, unless he's there to hang round and see that I
ain't done up. You'll have to get a fellow. You'll have to
come to it, as I'm always telling you. They're expensive, but
they're company--anybody you can count on for shining up, even
if it is for what they can get out of you, is better than not
having nobody nowhere. And they keep off bums and lobbygows
and scare the bilkers into coughing up."

"Not for me," replied Susan.

The greater the catastrophe, the longer the time before it is
fully realized. Susan's loss of the money that represented so
much of savage if momentary horror, and so much of unconscious
hope this calamity did not overwhelm her for several days.
Then she yielded for the first time to the lure of opium. She
had listened longingly to the descriptions of the delights as
girls and men told; for practically all of them smoked--or took
cocaine. But to Clara's or Gussie's invitations to join the
happy band of dreamers, she had always replied, "Not yet. I'm
saving that." Now, however, she felt that the time had come.
Hope in this world she had none. Before the black adventure,
why not try the world of blissful unreality to which it gave
entrance? Why leave life until she had exhausted all it put
within her reach?

She went to Gussie's room at midnight and flung herself down in
a wrapper upon a couch opposite a sallow, delicate young man.
His great dark eyes were gazing unseeingly at her, were perhaps
using her as an outline sketch from which his imagination could
picture a beauty of loveliness beyond human. Gussie taught her
how to prepare the little ball of opium, how to put it on the
pipe and draw in its fumes. Her system was so well prepared
for it by the poisons she had drunk that she had satisfactory
results from the outset. And she entered upon the happiest
period of her life thus far. All the hideousness of her
profession disappeared under the gorgeous draperies of the
imagination. Opium's magic transformed the vile, the obscene,
into the lofty, the romantic, the exalted. The world she had
been accustomed to regard as real ceased to be even the blur
the poisonous liquors had made of it, became a vague, distant
thing seen in a dream. Her opium world became the vivid reality.

The life she had been leading had made her extremely thin, had
hardened and dulled her eyes, had given her that sad,
shuddering expression of the face upon which have beaten a
thousand mercenary and lustful kisses. The opium soon changed
all this. Her skin, always tending toward pallor, became of
the dead amber-white of old ivory. Her thinness took on an
ethereal transparency that gave charm even to her slight stoop.
Her face became dreamy, exalted, rapt; and her violet-gray eyes
looked from it like the vents of poetical fires burning without
ceasing upon an altar to the god of dreams. Never had she been
so beautiful; never had she been so happy--not with the coarser
happiness of dancing eye and laughing lip, but with the ecstasy
of soul that is like the shimmers of a tranquil sea quivering
rhythmically under the caresses of moonlight.

In her descent she had now reached that long narrow shelf along
which she would walk so long as health and looks should
last--unless some accident should topple her off on the one
side into suicide or on the other side into the criminal
prostitute class. And such accidents were likely to happen.
Still there was a fair chance of her keeping her balance until
loss of looks and loss of health--the end of the shelf--should
drop her abruptly to the very bottom. She could guess what was
there. Every day she saw about the streets, most wretched and
most forlorn of its wretched and forlorn things, the solitary
old women, bent and twisted, wrapped in rotting rags, picking
papers and tobacco from the gutters and burrowing in garbage
barrels, seeking somehow to get the drink or the dope that
changed hell into heaven for them.

Despite liquor and opium and the degradations of the
street-woman's life she walked that narrow ledge with curious
steadiness. She was unconscious of the cause. Indeed,
self-consciousness had never been one of her traits. The cause
is interesting.

In our egotism, in our shame of what we ignorantly regard as
the lowliness of our origin we are always seeking alleged lofty
spiritual explanations of our doings, and overlook the actual,
quite simple real reason. One of the strongest factors in
Susan's holding herself together in face of overwhelming odds,
was the nearly seventeen years of early training her Aunt Fanny
Warham had given her in orderly and systematic ways--a place
for everything and everything in its place; a time for
everything and everything at its time, neatness, scrupulous
cleanliness, no neglecting of any of the small, yet large,
matters that conserve the body. Susan had not been so apt a
pupil of Fanny Warham's as was Ruth, because Susan had not
Ruth's nature of the old-maidish, cut-and-dried conventional.
But during the whole fundamentally formative period of her life
Susan Lenox had been trained to order and system, and they had
become part of her being, beyond the power of drink and opium
and prostitution to disintegrate them until the general
break-up should come. In all her wanderings every man or woman
or girl she had met who was not rapidly breaking up, but was
offering more or less resistance to the assaults of bad habits,
was one who like herself had acquired in childhood strong good
habits to oppose the bad habits and to fight them with. An
enemy must be met with his own weapons or stronger. The
strongest weapons that can be given a human animal for
combating the destructive forces of the struggle for existence
are not good sentiments or good principles or even pious or
moral practices--for, bad habits can make short work of all
these--but are good habits in the practical, material matters
of life. They operate automatically, they apply to all the
multitude of small, every day; semi-unconscious actions of the
daily routine. They preserve the _morale_. And not morality
but morals is the warp of character--the part which, once
destroyed or even frayed, cannot be restored.

Susan, unconsciously and tenaciously practicing her early
training in order and system whenever she could and wherever
she could, had an enormous advantage over the mass of the
girls, both respectable and fast. And while their evidence was
always toward "going to pieces" her tendency was always to
repair and to put off the break-up.

One June evening she was looking through the better class of
dance halls and drinking resorts for Clara, to get her to go up
to Gussie's for a smoke. She opened a door she had never
happened to enter before--a dingy door with the glass frosted.
Just inside there was a fetid little bar; view of the rest of
the room was cut off by a screen from behind which came the
sound of a tuneless old piano. She knew Clara would not be in
such a den, but out of curiosity she glanced round the screen.
She was seeing a low-ceilinged room, the walls almost dripping
with the dirt of many and many a hard year. In a corner was
the piano, battered, about to fall to pieces, its ancient and
horrid voice cracked by the liquor which had been poured into
it by facetious drunkards. At the keyboard sat an old
hunchback, broken-jawed, dressed in slimy rags, his one eye
instantly fixed upon her with a lecherous expression that made
her shiver as it compelled her to imagine the embrace he was
evidently imagining. His filthy fingers were pounding out a
waltz. About the floor were tottering in the measure of the
waltz a score of dreadful old women. They were in calico.
They had each a little biscuit knot of white hair firmly upon
the crown of the head. From their bleached, seamed old faces
gleamed the longings or the torments of all the passions they
could no longer either inspire or satisfy. They were one time
prostitutes, one time young, perhaps pretty women, now
descending to death--still prostitutes in heart and mind but
compelled to live as scrub women, cleaners of all manner of
loathsome messes in dives after the drunkards had passed on.
They were now enjoying the reward of their toil, the pleasures
of which they dreamed and to which they looked forward as they
dragged their stiff old knees along the floors in the wake of
the brush and the cloth. They were drinking biting poisons
from tin cups--for those hands quivering with palsy could not
be trusted with glass-dancing with drunken, disease-swollen or
twisted legs--venting from ghastly toothless mouths strange
cries of merriment that sounded like shrieks of damned souls at
the licking of quenchless flames.

Susan stood rooted to the threshold of that frightful
scene--that vision of the future toward which she was hurrying.
A few years--a very few years--and, unless she should have
passed through the Morgue, here she would be, abandoning her
body to abominations beyond belief at the hands of degenerate
oriental sailors to get a few pennies for the privileges of
this dance hall. And she would laugh, as did these, would
enjoy as did these, would revel in the filth her senses had
been trained to find sweet. "No! No!" she protested. "I'd
kill myself first!" And then she cowered again, as the thought
came that she probably would not, any more than these had
killed themselves. The descent would be gradual--no matter how
swift, still gradual. Only the insane put an end to life.
Yes--she would come here some day.

She leaned against the wall, her throat contracting in a fit of
nausea. She grew cold all over; her teeth chattered. She
tried in vain to tear her gaze from the spectacle; some
invisible power seemed to be holding her head in a vise,
thrusting her struggling eyelids violently open.

There were several men, dead drunk, asleep in old wooden chairs
against the wall. One of these men was so near her that she
could have touched him. His clothing was such an assortment of
rags slimy and greasy as one sometimes sees upon the top of a
filled garbage barrel to add its horrors of odor of long
unwashed humanity to the stenches from vegetable decay. His
wreck of a hard hat had fallen from his head as it dropped
forward in drunken sleep. Something in the shape of the head
made her concentrate upon this man. She gave a sharp cry,
stretched out her hand, touched the man's shoulder.

"Rod!" she cried. "Rod!"

The head slowly lifted, and the bleary, blowsy wreck of
Roderick Spenser's handsome face was turned stupidly toward
her. Into his gray eyes slowly came a gleam of recognition.
Then she saw the red of shame burst into his hollow cheeks, and
the head quickly drooped.

She shook him. "Rod! It's _you!_"

"Get the hell out," he mumbled. "I want to sleep."

"You know me," she said. "I see the color in your face. Oh,
Rod--you needn't be ashamed before _me_."

She felt him quiver under her fingers pressing upon his
shoulder. But he pretended to snore.

"Rod," she pleaded, "I want you to come along with me. I can't
do you any harm now."

The hunchback had stopped playing. The old women were crowding
round Spenser and her, were peering at them, with eyes eager
and ears a-cock for romance--for nowhere on this earth do the
stars shine so sweetly as down between the precipices of shame
to the black floor of the slum's abyss. Spenser, stooped and
shaking, rose abruptly, thrust Susan aside with a sweep of the
arm that made her reel, bolted into the street. She recovered
her balance and amid hoarse croakings of "That's right, honey!
Don't give him up!" followed the shambling, swaying figure.
He was too utterly drunk to go far; soon down he sank, a heap
of rags and filth, against a stoop.

She bent over him, saw he was beyond rousing, straightened and
looked about her. Two honest looking young Jews stopped.
"Won't you help me get him home?" she said to them.
"Sure!" replied they in chorus. And, with no outward sign of
the disgust they must have felt at the contact, they lifted up
the sot, in such fantastic contrast to Susan's clean and even
stylish appearance, and bore him along, trying to make him seem
less the helpless whiskey-soaked dead weight. They dragged him
up the two flights of stairs and, as she pushed back the door,
deposited him on the floor. She assured them they could do
nothing more, thanked them, and they departed. Clara appeared
in her doorway.

"God Almighty, Lorna!" she cried. "_What_ have you got there?
How'd it get in?"

"You've been advising me to take a fellow," said Susan.
"Well--here he is."

Clara looked at her as if she thought her crazed by drink or
dope. "I'll call the janitor and have him thrown out."

"No, he's my lover," said Susan. "Will you help me clean him up?"

Clara, looking at Spenser's face now, saw those signs which not
the hardest of the world's hard uses can cut or tear away.
"Oh!" she said, in a tone of sympathy. "He _is_ down, isn't he?
But he'll pull round all right."

She went into her room to take off her street clothes and to
get herself into garments as suitable as she possessed for one
of those noisome tasks that are done a dozen times a day by the
bath nurses in the receiving department of a charity hospital.
When she returned, Susan too was in her chemise and ready to
begin the search for the man, if man there was left deep buried
in that muck. While Susan took off the stinking and rotten
rags, and flung them into the hall, Clara went to the bathroom
they and Mollie shared, and filled the tub with water as hot as
her hand could bear. With her foot Susan pushed the rags along
the hall floor and into the garbage closet. Then she and Clara
lifted the emaciated, dirt-streaked, filth-smeared body,
carried it to the bathroom, let it down into the water. There
were at hand plenty of those strong, specially prepared soaps
and other disinfectants constantly used by the women of their
kind who still cling to cleanliness and health. With these
they attacked him, not as if he were a human being, but as if
he were some inanimate object that must be scoured before it
could be used.

Again and again they let out the water, black, full of dead and
dying vermin; again and again they rinsed him, attacked him
afresh. Their task grew less and less repulsive as the man
gradually appeared, a young man with a soft skin, a well-formed
body, unusually good hands and feet, a distinguished face
despite its savage wounds from dissipation, hardly the less
handsome for the now fair and crisp beard which gave it a look
of more years than Spenser had lived.

If Spenser recovered consciousness--and it seems hardly
possible that he did not--he was careful to conceal the fact.
He remained limp, inert, apparently in a stupor. They gave him
one final scrubbing, one final rinsing, one final thorough
inspection. "Now, he's all right," declared Clara. "What
shall we do with him?"

"Put him to bed," said Susan.

They had already dried him off in the empty tub. They now
rubbed him down with a rough towel, lifted him, Susan taking
the shoulders, Clara the legs, and put him in Susan's bed.
Clara ran to her room, brought one of the two nightshirts she
kept for her fellow. When they had him in this and with a
sheet over him, they cleaned and straightened the bathroom,
then lit cigarettes and sat down to rest and to admire the work
of their hands.

"Who is he?" asked Clara.

"A man I used to know," said Susan. Like all the girls in that
life with a real story to tell, she never told about her past
self. Never tell? They never even remember if drink and drugs
will do their duty.

"I don't blame you for loving him," said Clara. "Somehow, the
lower a man sinks the more a woman loves him. It's the other
way with men. But then men don't know what love is. And a
woman don't really know till she's been through the mill."

"I don't love him," said Susan.

"Same thing," replied the practical Clara, with a wave of the
bare arm at the end of which smoked the cigarette. "What're
you going to do with him?"

"I don't know," confessed Susan.

She was not a little uneasy at the thought of his awakening.
Would he despise her more than ever now--fly from her back to
his filth? Would he let her try to help him? And she looked
at the face which had been, in that other life so long, long
ago, dearer to her than any face her eyes had ever rested upon;
a sob started deep down within her, found its slow and painful
way upward, shaking her whole body and coming from between her
clenched teeth in a groan. She forgot all she had suffered
from Rod--forgot the truth about him which she had slowly
puzzled out after she left him and as experience enabled her to
understand actions she had not understood at the time. She
forgot it all. That past--that far, dear, dead past! Again
she was a simple, innocent girl upon the high rock, eating that
wonderful dinner. Again the evening light faded, stars and
moon came out, and she felt the first sweet stirring of love
for him. She could hear his voice, the light, clear,
entrancing melody of the Duke's song--

La Donna e mobile
Qua penna al vento--

She burst into tears--tears that drenched her soul as the rain
drenches the blasted desert and makes the things that could
live in beauty stir deep in its bosom. And Clara, sobbing in
sympathy, kissed her and stole away, softly closing the door.
"If a man die, shall he live again?" asked the old Arabian
philosopher. If a woman die, shall she live again?. . .
Shall not that which dies in weakness live again in strength?. . .
Looking at him, as he lay there sleeping so quietly, her
being surged with the heaving of high longings and hopes.
If _they_ could only live again! Here they were, together, at
the lowest depth, at the rock bottom of life. If they could
build on that rock, build upon the very foundation of the
world, then would they indeed build in strength! Then, nothing
could destroy--nothing!. . . If they could live again! If
they could build!

She had something to live for--something to fight for. Into
her eyes came a new light; into her soul came peace and
strength. Something to live for--someone to redeem. XI

SHE fell asleep, her head resting upon her hand, her elbow on
the arm of the chair. She awoke with a shiver; she opened her
eyes to find him gazing at her. The eyes of both shifted
instantly. "Wouldn't you like some whiskey?" she asked.

"Thanks," replied he, and his unchanged voice reminded her
vividly of his old self, obscured by the beard and by the
dissipated look.

She took the bottle from its concealment in the locked
washstand drawer, poured him out a large drink. When she came
back where he could see the whiskey in the glass, his eyes
glistened and he raised himself first on his elbow, then to a
sitting position. His shaking hand reached out eagerly and his
expectant lips quivered. He gulped the whiskey down.

"Thank you," he said, gazing longingly at the bottle as he held
the empty glass toward her.

"More?"

"I _would_ like a little more," said he gratefully.

Again she poured him a large drink, and again he gulped it
down. "That's strong stuff," said he. "But then they sell
strong stuff in this part of town. The other kind tastes weak
to me now."

He dropped back against the pillows. She poured herself a
drink. Halfway to her lips the glass halted. "I've got to
stop that," thought she, "if I'm going to do anything for him
or for myself." And she poured the whiskey back and put the
bottle away. The whole incident took less than five seconds.
It did not occur that she was essaying and achieving the
heroic, that she had in that instant revealed her right to her
dream of a career high above the common lot.

"Don't _you_ drink?" said he.

"I've decided to cut it out," replied she carelessly. "There's
nothing in it."

"I couldn't live without it--and wouldn't."

"It _is_ a comfort when one's on the way down," said she. "But
I'm going to try the other direction--for a change."

She held a box of cigarettes toward him. He took one, then
she; she held the lighted match for him, lit her own cigarette,
let the flame of the match burn on, she absently watching it.

"Look out! You'll burn yourself!" cried he.

She started, threw the match into the slop jar. "How do you
feel?" inquired she.

"Like the devil," he answered. "But then I haven't known what
it was to feel any other way for several months except when I
couldn't feel at all." A long silence, both smoking, he
thinking, she furtively watching him. "You haven't changed so
much," he finally said. "At least, not on the outside."

"More on the outside than on the inside," said she. "The
inside doesn't change much. There I'm almost as I was that day
on the big rock. And I guess you are, too--aren't you?"

"The devil I am! I've grown hard and bitter."

"That's all outside," declared she. "That's the shell--like
the scab that stays over the sore spot till it heals."

"Sore spot? I'm nothing but sore spots. I've been treated
like a dog."

And he proceeded to talk about the only subject that interested
him--himself. He spoke in a defensive way, as if replying to
something she had said or thought. "I've not got down in the
world without damn good excuse. I wrote several plays, and
they were tried out of town. But we never could get into New
York. I think Brent was jealous of me, and his influence kept
me from a hearing. I know it sounds conceited, but I'm sure
I'm right."

"Brent?" said she, in a queer voice. "Oh, I think you must be
mistaken. He doesn't look like a man who could do petty mean
things. No, I'm sure he's not petty."

"Do you know him?" cried Spenser, in an irritated tone.

"No. But--someone pointed him out to me once--a long time
ago--one night in the Martin. And then--you'll remember--there
used to be a great deal of talk about him when we lived in
Forty-third Street. You admired him tremendously."

"Well, he's responsible," said Spenser, sullenly. "The men on
top are always trampling down those who are trying to climb up.
He had it in for me. One of my friends who thought he was a
decent chap gave him my best play to read. He returned it with
some phrases about its showing talent--one of those phrases
that don't mean a damn thing. And a few weeks ago--" Spenser
raised himself excitedly--"the thieving hound produced a play
that was a clean steal from mine. I'd be laughed at if I
protested or sued. But I _know_, curse him!"

He fell back shaking so violently that his cigarette dropped to
the sheet. Susan picked it up, handed it to him. He eyed her
with angry suspicion. "You don't believe me, do you?" he demanded.

"I don't know anything about it," replied she. "Anyhow, what
does it matter? The man I met on that show boat--the Mr.
Burlingham I've often talked about--he used to say that the dog
that stopped to lick his scratches never caught up with the prey."

He flung himself angrily in the bed. "You never did have any
heart--any sympathy. But who has? Even Drumley went back on
me--let 'em put a roast of my last play in the _Herald_--a
telegraphed roast from New Haven--said it was a dead failure.
And who wrote it? Why, some newspaper correspondent in the pay
of the _Syndicate_--and that means Brent. And of course it was
a dead failure. So--I gave up--and here I am. . . . This
your room?"

"Yes."

"Where's this nightshirt come from?"

"It belongs to the friend of the girl across the hall." He
laughed sneeringly. "The hell it does!" mocked he. "I
understand perfectly. I want my clothes."

"No one is coming," said Susan. "There's no one to come."

He was looking round the comfortable little room that was the
talk of the whole tenement and was stirring wives and fast
women alike to "do a little fixing up." Said he:

"A nice little nest you've made for him. You always were good
at that."

"I've made it for myself," said she. "I never bring men here."

"I want my clothes," cried he. "I haven't sunk that low, you----!"

The word he used did not greatly disturb Susan. The shell she
had formed over herself could ward off brutal contacts of
languages no less than of the other kinds. It did, however,
shock her a little to hear Rod Spenser use a word so crude.

"Give me my clothes," he ordered, waving his fists in a fierce,
feeble gesture.

"They were torn all to pieces. I threw them away. I'll get
you some more in the morning."

He dropped back again, a scowl upon his face. "I've got no
money--not a damn cent. I did half a day's work on the docks
and made enough to quiet me last night." He raised himself.
"I can work again. Give me my clothes!"

"They're gone," said Susan. "They were completely used up."

This brought back apparently anything but dim memory of what
his plight had been. "How'd I happen to get so clean?"

"Clara and I washed you off a little. You had fallen down."

He lay silent a few minutes, then said in a hesitating, ashamed
tone, "My troubles have made me a boor. I beg your pardon.
You've been tremendously kind to me."

"Oh, it wasn't much. Don't you feel sleepy?"

"Not a bit." He dragged himself from the bed. "But _you_ do.
I must go."

She laughed in the friendliest way. "You can't. You haven't
any clothes."

He passed his hand over his face and coughed violently, she
holding his head and supporting his emaciated shoulders. After
several minutes of coughing and gagging, gasping and groaning
and spitting, he was relieved by the spasm and lay down again.
When he got his breath, he said--with rest between words--"I'd
ask you to send for the ambulance, but if the doctors catch me,
they'll lock me away. I've got consumption. Oh, I'll soon be
out of it."

Susan sat silent. She did not dare look at him lest he should
see the pity and horror in her eyes.

"They'll find a cure for it," pursued he. "But not till the
day after I'm gone. That is the way my luck runs. Still, I
don't see why I should care to stay--and I don't! Have you any
more of that whiskey?"

Susan brought out the bottle again, gave him the last of the
whiskey--a large drink. He sat up, sipping it to make it last.
He noted the long row of books on the shelf fastened along the
wall beside the bed, the books and magazines on the table.
Said he:

"As fond of reading as ever, I see?"

"Fonder," said she. "It takes me out of myself."

"I suppose you read the sort of stuff you really like, now--not
the things you used to read to make old Drumley think you were
cultured and intellectual."

"No--the same sort," replied she, unruffled by his
contemptuous, unjust fling. "Trash bores me."

"Come to think of it, I guess you did have pretty good taste
in books."

But he was interested in himself, like all invalids; and, like
them, he fancied his own intense interest could not but be
shared by everyone. He talked on and on of himself, after the
manner of failures--told of his wrongs, of how friends had
betrayed him, of the jealousies and enmities his talents had
provoked. Susan was used to these hard-luck stories, was used
to analyzing them. With the aid of what she had worked out as
to his character after she left him, she had no difficulty in
seeing that he was deceiving himself, was excusing himself.
But after all she had lived through, after all she had
discovered about human frailty, especially in herself, she was
not able to criticize, much less condemn, anybody. Her doubts
merely set her to wondering whether he might not also be
self-deceived as to his disease.

"Why do you think you've got consumption?" asked she.

"I was examined at the free dispensary up in Second Avenue the
other day. I've suspected what was the matter for several
months. They told me I was right."

"But the doctors are always making mistakes. I'd not give up
if I were you."

"Do you suppose I would if I had anything to live for?"

"I was thinking about that a while ago--while you were asleep."

"Oh, I'm all in. That's a cinch."

"So am I," said she. "And as we've nothing to lose and no hope,
why, trying to do something won't make us any worse off. . . .
We've both struck the bottom. We can't go any lower." She
leaned forward and, with her earnest eyes fixed upon him,
said, "Rod--why not try--together?"

He closed his eyes.

"I'm afraid I can't be of much use to you," she went on. "But
you can help me. And helping me will make you help yourself.
I can't get up alone. I've tried. No doubt it's my fault. I
guess I'm one of those women that aren't hard enough or
self-confident enough to do what's necessary unless I've got
some man to make me do it. Perhaps I'd get the--the strength
or whatever it is, when I was much older. But by that time in
my case--I guess it'd be too late. Won't you help me, Rod?"

He turned his head away, without opening his eyes.

"You've helped me many times--beginning with the first day we met."

"Don't," he said. "I went back on you. I did sprain my ankle,
but I could have come."

"That wasn't anything," replied she. "You had already done a
thousand times more than you needed to do."

His hand wandered along the cover in her direction. She
touched it. Their hands clasped.

"I lied about where I got the money yesterday. I didn't work.
I begged. Three of us--from the saloon they call the Owl's
Chute--two Yale men--one of them had been a judge--and I.
We've been begging for a week. We were going out on the road
in a few days--to rob. Then--I saw you--in that old women's
dance hall--the Venusberg, they call it."

"You've come down here for me, Rod. You'll take me back?
You'll save me from the Venusberg?"

"I couldn't save anybody. Susie, at bottom I'm N. G. I
always was--and I knew it. Weak--vain. But you! If you
hadn't been a woman--and such a sweet, considerate one you'd
have never got down here."

"Such a fool," corrected Susan. "But, once I get up, I'll not
be so again. I'll fight under the rules, instead of acting in
the silly way they teach us as children."

"Don't say those hard things, Susie!"

"Aren't they true?"

"Yes, but I can't bear to hear them from a woman. . . . I
told you that you hadn't changed. But after I'd looked at you
a while I saw that you have. You've got a terrible look in
your eyes--wonderful and terrible. You had something of that
look as a child--the first time I saw you."

"The day after my marriage," said the girl, tearing her
face away.

"It was there then," he went on. "But now--it's--it's
heartbreaking, Susie when your face is in repose."

"I've gone through a fire that has burned up every bit of me
that can burn," said she. "I've been wondering if what's left
isn't strong enough to do something with. I believe so--if
you'll help me."

"Help you? I--help anybody? Don't mock me, Susie."

"I don't know about anybody else," said she sweetly and gently,
"but I do know about me."

"No use--too late. I've lost my nerve." He began to sob.
"It's because I'm unstrung," explained he.

"Don't think I'm a poor contemptible fool of a whiner. . . .
Yes, I _am_ a whiner! Susie, I ought to have been the woman
and you the man. Weak--weak--weak!"

She turned the gas low, bent over him, kissed his brow,
caressed him. "Let's do the best we can," she murmured.

He put his arm round her. "I wonder if there _is_ any hope," he
said. "No--there couldn't be."

"Let's not hope," pleaded she. "Let's just do the best we can."

"What--for instance?"

"You know the theater people. You might write a little play--a
sketch--and you and I could act it in one of the ten-cent houses."

"That's not a bad idea!" exclaimed he. "A little comedy--about
fifteen or twenty minutes." And he cast about for a plot,
found the beginnings of one the ancient but ever acceptable
commonplace of a jealous quarrel between two lovers--"I'll lay
the scene in Fifth Avenue--there's nothing low life likes so
much as high life." He sketched, she suggested. They planned
until broad day, then fell asleep, she half sitting up, his
head pillowed upon her lap.

She was awakened by a sense of a parching and suffocating heat.
She started up with the idea of fire in her drowsy mind. But
a glance at him revealed the real cause. His face was fiery
red, and from his lips came rambling sentences, muttered,
whispered, that indicated the delirium of a high fever. She
had first seen it when she and the night porter broke into
Burlingham's room in the Walnut Street House, in Cincinnati.
She had seen it many a time since; for, while she herself had
never been ill, she had been surrounded by illness all the
time, and the commonest form of it was one of these fevers,
outraged nature's frenzied rise against the ever denser swarms
of enemies from without which the slums sent to attack her.
Susan ran across the hall and roused Clara, who would watch
while she went for a doctor. "You'd better get Einstein in
Grand Street," Clara advised.

"Why not Sacci?" asked Susan.

"Our doctor doesn't know anything but the one thing--and
he doesn't like to take other kinds of cases. No, get
Einstein. . . . You know, he's like all of them--he won't
come unless you pay in advance."

"How much?" asked Susan.

"Three dollars. I'll lend you if----"

"No--I've got it." She had eleven dollars and sixty cents in
the world.

Einstein pronounced it a case of typhoid. "You must get him to
the hospital at once."

Susan and Clara looked at each other in terror. To them, as to
the masses everywhere, the hospital meant almost certain death;
for they assumed--and they had heard again and again
accusations which warranted it--that the public hospital
doctors and nurses treated their patients with neglect always,
with downright inhumanity often. Not a day passed without
their hearing some story of hospital outrage upon poverty,
without their seeing someone--usually some child--who was
paying a heavy penalty for having been in the charity wards.

Einstein understood their expression. "Nonsense!" said he
gruffly. "You girls look too sensible to believe those silly lies."

Susan looked at him steadily. His eyes shifted. "Of course, the
pay service _is_ better," said he in a strikingly different tone.

"How much would it be at a pay hospital?" asked Susan.

"Twenty-five a week including my services," said Doctor
Einstein. "But you can't afford that."

"Will he get the best treatment for that?"

"The very best. As good as if he were Rockefeller or the big
chap uptown."

"In advance, I suppose?"

"Would we ever get our money out of people if we didn't get it
in advance? We've got to live just the same as any other class."

"I understand," said the girl. "I don't blame you. I don't
blame anybody for anything." She said to Clara, "Can you lend
me twenty?"

"Sure. Come in and get it." When she and Susan were in the
hall beyond Einstein's hearing, she went on: "I've got the
twenty and you're welcome to it. But--Lorna hadn't you
better----"

"In the same sort of a case, what'd _you_ do?" interrupted Susan.

Clara laughed. "Oh--of course." And she gave Susan a roll of
much soiled bills--a five, the rest ones and twos.

"I can get the ambulance to take him free," said Einstein.
"That'll save you five for a carriage."

She accepted this offer. And when the ambulance went, with
Spenser burning and raving in the tightly wrapped blankets,
Susan followed in a street car to see with her own eyes that he
was properly installed. It was arranged that she could visit
him at any hour and stay as long as she liked.

She returned to the tenement, to find the sentiment of the
entire neighborhood changed toward her. Not loss of money, not
loss of work, not dispossession nor fire nor death is the
supreme calamity among the poor, but sickness. It is their
most frequent visitor--sickness in all its many frightful
forms--rheumatism and consumption, cancer and typhoid and the
rest of the monsters. Yet never do the poor grow accustomed or
hardened. And at the sight of the ambulance the neighborhood
had been instantly stirred. When the reason for its coming got
about, Susan became the object of universal sympathy and
respect. She was not sending her friend to be neglected and
killed at a charity hospital; she was paying twenty-five a week
that he might have a chance for life--twenty-five dollars a
week! The neighbors felt that her high purpose justified any
means she might be compelled to employ in getting the money.
Women who had scowled and spat as she walked by, spoke
friendlily to her and wiped their eyes with their filthy
skirts, and prayed in church and synagogue that she might
prosper until her man was well and the old debt paid. Clara
went from group to group, relating the whole story, and the
tears flowed at each recital. Money they had none to give; but
what they had they gave with that generosity which suddenly
transfigures rags and filth and makes foul and distorted bodies
lift in the full dignity of membership in the human family.
Everywhere in those streets were seen the ravages of
disease--rheumatism and rickets and goiter, wen and tumors and
cancer, children with only one arm or one leg, twisted spines,
sunken chests, distorted hips, scrofulous eyes and necks, all
the sad markings of poverty's supreme misery, the ferocious
penalties of ignorance, stupidity and want. But Susan's burden
of sorrow was not on this account overlooked.

Rafferty, who kept the saloon at the corner and was chief
lieutenant to O'Frayne, the District Leader, sent for her and
handed her a twenty. "That may help some," said he.

Susan hesitated--gave it back. "Thank you," said she, "and
perhaps later I'll have to get it from you. But I don't want
to get into debt. I already owe twenty."

"This ain't debt," explained Rafferty. "Take it and forget it."

"I couldn't do that," said the girl. "But maybe you'll lend it
to me, if I need it in a week or so?"

"Sure," said the puzzled saloon man--liquor store man, he
preferred to be called, or politician. "Any amount you want."

As she went away he looked after her, saying to his barkeeper:
"What do you think of that, Terry? I offered her a twenty and
she sidestepped."

Terry's brother had got drunk a few days before, had killed a
woman and was on his way to the chair. Terry scowled at the
boss and said:

"She's got a right to, ain't she? Don't she earn her money
honest, without harmin' anybody but herself? There ain't many
that can say that--not any that runs factories and stores and
holds their noses up as if they smelt their own sins, damn 'em!"

"She's a nice girl," said Rafferty, sauntering away. He was a
broad, tolerant and good-humored man; he made allowances for an
employee whose brother was in for murder.

Susan had little time to spend at the hospital. She must now
earn fifty dollars a week--nearly double the amount she had
been averaging. She must pay the twenty-five dollars for
Spenser, the ten dollars for her lodgings. Then there was the
seven dollars which must be handed to the police captain's
"wardman" in the darkness of some entry every Thursday night.
She had been paying the patrolman three dollars a week to keep
him in a good humor, and two dollars to the janitor's wife; she
might risk cutting out these items for the time, as both
janitor's wife and policeman were sympathetic. But on the
closest figuring, fifty a week would barely meet her absolute
necessities--would give her but seven a week for food and other
expenses and nothing toward repaying Clara.

Fifty dollars a week! She might have a better chance to make
it could she go back to the Broadway-Fifth Avenue district.
But however vague other impressions from the life about her
might have been, there had been branded into her a deep and
terrible fear of the police an omnipotence as cruel as destiny
itself--indeed, the visible form of that sinister god at
present. Once in the pariah class, once with a "police
record," and a man or woman would have to scale the steeps of
respectability up to a far loftier height than Susan ever
dreamed of again reaching, before that malign and relentless
power would abandon its tyranny. She did not dare risk
adventuring a part of town where she had no "pull" and where,
even should she by chance escape arrest, Freddie Palmer would
hear of her; would certainly revenge himself by having her
arrested and made an example of. In the Grand Street district
she must stay, and she must "stop the nonsense" and "play the
game"--must be businesslike.

She went to see the "wardman," O'Ryan, who under the guise of
being a plain clothes man or detective, collected and turned in
to the captain, who took his "bit" and passed up the rest, all
the money levied upon saloons, dives, procuresses, dealers in
unlawful goods of any kind from opium and cocaine to girls for
"hock shops."

O'Ryan was a huge brute of a man, his great hard face bearing
the scars of battles against pistol, knife, bludgeon and fist.
He was a sour and savage brute, hated and feared by everyone
for his tyrannies over the helpless poor and the helpless
outcast class. He had primitive masculine notions as to
feminine virtue, intact despite the latter day general
disposition to concede toleration and even a certain
respectability to prostitutes. But by some chance which she
and the other girls did not understand he treated Susan with
the utmost consideration, made the gangs appreciate that if
they annoyed her or tried to drag her into the net of tribute
in which they had enmeshed most of the girls worth while, he
would regard it as a personal defiance to himself.

Susan waited in the back room of the saloon nearest O'Ryan's
lodgings and sent a boy to ask him to come. The boy came back
with the astonishing message that she was to come to O'Ryan's
flat. Susan was so doubtful that she paused to ask the
janitress about it.

"It's all right," said the janitress. "Since his wife died
three years ago him and his baby lives alone. There's his old
mother but she's gone out. He's always at home when he ain't
on duty. He takes care of the baby himself, though it howls
all the time something awful."

Susan ascended, found the big policeman in his shirt sleeves,
trying to soothe the most hideous monstrosity she had ever
seen--a misshapen, hairy animal looking like a monkey, like a
rat, like half a dozen repulsive animals, and not at all like
a human being. The thing was clawing and growling and grinding
its teeth. At sight of Susan it fixed malevolent eyes on her
and began to snap its teeth at her.

"Don't mind him," said O'Ryan. "He's only acting up queer."

Susan sat not daring to look at the thing lest she should show
her aversion, and not knowing how to state her business when the
thing was so clamorous, so fiendishly uproarious. After a time
O'Ryan succeeded in quieting it. He seemed to think some
explanation was necessary. He began abruptly, his gaze
tenderly on the awful creature, his child, lying quiet now in
his arms:

"My wife--she died some time ago--died when the baby here was born."

"You spend a good deal of time with it," said Susan.

"All I can spare from my job. I'm afraid to trust him to
anybody, he being kind of different. Then, too, I _like_ to
take care of him. You see, it's all I've got to remember _her_
by. I'm kind o' tryin' to do what _she'd_ want did." His lips
quivered. He looked at his monstrous child. "Yes, I _like_
settin' here, thinkin'--and takin' care of him."

This brute of a slave driver, this cruel tyrant over the poor
and the helpless--yet, thus tender and gentle--thus capable of
the enormous sacrifice of a great, pure love!

"_You've_ got a way of lookin' out of the eyes that's like her,"
he went on--and Susan had the secret of his strange forbearance
toward her. "I suppose you've come about being let off on the
assessment?"

Already he knew the whole story of Rod and the hospital.
"Yes--that's why I'm bothering you," said she.

"You needn't pay but five-fifty. I can only let you off a
dollar and a half--my bit and the captain's. We pass the rest
on up--and we don't dare let you off."

"Oh, I can make the money," Susan said hastily. "Thank you,
Mr. O'Ryan, but I don't want to get anyone into trouble."

"We've got the right to knock off one dollar and a half," said
O'Ryan. "But if we let you off the other, the word would get
up to--to wherever the graft goes--and they'd send down along
the line, to have merry hell raised with us. The whole thing's
done systematic, and they won't take no excuses, won't allow no
breaks in the system nowhere. You can see for yourself--it'd go
to smash if they did."

"Somebody must get a lot of money," said Susan.

"Oh, it's dribbled out--and as you go higher up, I don't
suppose them that gets it knows where it comes from. The whole
world's nothing but graft, anyhow. Sorry I can't let you off."

The thing in his lap had recovered strength for a fresh fit of
malevolence. It was tearing at its hairy, hideous face with
its claws and was howling and shrieking, the big father gently
trying to soothe it--for _her_ sake. Susan got away quickly.
She halted in the deserted hall and gave way to a spasm of dry
sobbing--an overflow of all the emotions that had been
accumulating within her. In this world of noxious and
repulsive weeds, what sudden startling upshooting of what
beautiful flowers! Flowers where you would expect to find the
most noisome weeds of all, and vilest weeds where you would
expect to find flowers. What a world!

However--the fifty a week must be got--and she must be
businesslike.

Most of the girls who took to the streets came direct from the
tenements of New York, of the foreign cities or of the factory
towns of New England. And the world over, tenement house life
is an excellent school for the life of the streets. It
prevents modesty from developing; it familiarizes the eye, the
ear, the nerves, to all that is brutal; it takes away from a
girl every feeling that might act as a restraining influence
except fear--fear of maternity, of disease, of prison. Thus,
practically all the other girls had the advantage over Susan.
Soon after they definitely abandoned respectability and
appeared in the streets frankly members of the profession, they
became bold and rapacious. They had an instinctive feeling
that their business was as reputable as any other, more
reputable than many held in high repute, that it would be most
reputable if it paid better and were less uncertain. They
respected themselves for all things, talk to the contrary in
the search for the sympathy and pity most human beings crave.
They despised the men as utterly as the men despised them.
They bargained as shamelessly as the men. Even those who did
not steal still felt that stealing was justifiable; for, in the
streets the sex impulse shows stripped of all disguise, shows
as a brutal male appetite, and the female feels that her
yielding to it entitles her to all she can compel and cozen and
crib. Susan had been unfitted for her profession--as for all
active, unsheltered life--by her early training. The point of
view given us in our childhood remains our point of view as to
all the essentials of life to the end. Reason, experience, the
influence of contact with many phases of the world, may change
us seemingly, but the under-instinct remains unchanged. Thus,
Susan had never lost, and never would lose her original
repugnance; not even drink had ever given her the courage to
approach men or to bargain with them. Her shame was a false
shame, like most of the shame in the world--a lack of courage,
not a lack of desire--and, however we may pretend, there can be
no virtue in abstinence merely through cowardice. Still, if
there be merit in shrinking, even when the cruelest necessities
were goading, that merit was hers in full measure. As a matter
of reason and sense, she admitted that the girls who respected
themselves and practiced their profession like merchants of
other kinds were right, were doing what she ought to do.
Anyhow, it was absurd to practice a profession half-heartedly.
To play your game, whatever it might be, for all there was in
it--that was the obvious first principle of success. Yet--she
remained laggard and squeamish.

What she had been unable to do for herself, to save herself
from squalor, from hunger, from cold, she was now able to do
for the sake of another--to help the man who had enabled her to
escape from that marriage, more hideous than anything she had
endured since, or ever could be called upon to endure--to save
him from certain neglect and probable death in the "charity"
hospital. Not by merely tolerating the not too impossible men
who joined her without sign from her, and not by merely
accepting what they gave, could fifty dollars a week be made.
She must dress herself in franker avowal of her profession,
must look as expensive as her limited stock of clothing,
supplemented by her own taste, would permit. She must flirt,
must bargain, must ask for presents, must make herself
agreeable, must resort to the crude female arts--which,
however, are subtle enough to convince the self-enchanted male
even in face of the discouraging fact of the mercenary
arrangement. She must crush down her repugnance, must be
active, not simply passive--must get the extra dollars by
stimulating male appetites, instead of simply permitting them
to satisfy themselves. She must seem rather the eager mistress
than the reluctant and impatient wife.

And she did abruptly change her manner. There was in her, as
her life had shown, a power of endurance, an ability to
sacrifice herself in order to do the thing that seemed
necessary, and to do it without shuffling or whining. Whatever
else her career had done for her, it undoubtedly had
strengthened this part of her nature. And now the result of
her training showed. With her superior intelligence for the
first time free to make the best of her opportunities, she
abruptly became equal to the most consummate of her sisters in
that long line of her sister-panders to male appetites which
extends from the bought wife or mistress or fiancee of the rich
grandee down all the social ranks to the wife or street girl
cozening for a tipsy day-laborer's earnings on a Saturday night
and the work girl teasing her "steady company" toward matrimony
on the park bench or in the dark entry of the tenement.

She was able to pay Clara back in less than ten days. In
Spenser's second week at the hospital she had him moved to
better quarters and better attendance at thirty dollars a week.

Although she had never got rid of her most unprofessional habit
of choosing and rejecting, there had been times when need
forced her into straits where her lot seemed to her almost as
low as that of the slave-like wives of the tenements, made her
almost think she would be nearly as well off were she the wife,
companion, butt, servant and general vent to some one dull and
distasteful provider of a poor living. But now she no longer
felt either degraded or heart sick and heart weary. And when
he passed the worst crisis her spirits began to return.

And when Roderick should be well, and the sketch written--and
an engagement got--Ah, then! Life indeed--life, at last! Was
it this hope that gave her the strength to fight down and
conquer the craving for opium? Or was it the necessity of
keeping her wits and of saving every cent? Or was it because
the opium habit, like the drink habit, like every other habit,
is a matter of a temperament far more than it is a matter of an
appetite--and that she had the appetite but not the
temperament? No doubt this had its part in the quick and
complete victory. At any rate, fight and conquer she did. The
strongest interest always wins. She had an interest stronger
than love of opium--an interest that substituted itself for opium
and for drink and supplanted them. Life indeed--life, at last!

In his third week Rod began to round toward health. Einstein
observed from the nurse's charts that Susan's visits were
having an unfavorably exciting effect. He showed her the
readings of temperature and pulse, and forbade her to stay
longer than five minutes at each of her two daily visits.
Also, she must not bring up any topic beyond the sickroom
itself. One day Spenser greeted her with, "I'll feel better,
now that I've got this off my mind." He held out to her a
letter. "Take that to George Fitzalan. He's an old friend of
mine--one I've done a lot for and never asked any favors of.
He may be able to give you something fairly good, right away."

Susan glanced penetratingly at him, saw he had been brooding
over the source of the money that was being spent upon him.
"Very well," said she, "I'll go as soon as I can."

"Go this afternoon," said he with an invalid's fretfulness.
"And when you come this evening you can tell me how you got on."

"Very well. This afternoon. But you know, Rod, there's not a
ghost of a chance."

"I tell you Fitzalan's my friend. He's got some gratitude.
He'll _do_ something."

"I don't want you to get into a mood where you'll be awfully
depressed if I should fail."

"But you'll not fail."

It was evident that Spenser, untaught by experience and
flattered into exaggerating his importance by the solicitude
and deference of doctors and nurses to a paying invalid, had
restored to favor his ancient enemy--optimism, the certain
destroyer of any man who does not shake it off. She went away,
depressed and worried. When she should come back with the only
possible news, what would be the effect upon him--and he still
in a critical stage? As the afternoon must be given to
business, she decided to go straight uptown, hoping to catch
Fitzalan before he went out to lunch. And twenty minutes after
making this decision she was sitting in the anteroom of a suite
of theatrical offices in the Empire Theater building. The girl
in attendance had, as usual, all the airs little people assume
when they are in close, if menial, relations with a person who,
being important to them, therefore fills their whole small
horizon. She deigned to take in Susan's name and the letter.
Susan seated herself at the long table and with the seeming of
calmness that always veiled her in her hours of greatest
agitation, turned over the pages of the theatrical journals and
magazines spread about in quantity.

After perhaps ten silent and uninterrupted minutes a man
hurried in from the outside hall, strode toward the frosted
glass door marked "Private." With his hand reaching for the
knob he halted, made an impatient gesture, plumped himself down
at the long table--at its distant opposite end. With a sweep of
the arm he cleared a space wherein he proceeded to spread
papers from his pocket and to scribble upon them furiously.
When Susan happened to glance at him, his head was bent so low
and his straw hat was tilted so far forward that she could not
see his face. She observed that he was dressed attractively in
an extremely light summer suit of homespun; his hands were
large and strong and ruddy--the hands of an artist, in good
health. Her glance returned to the magazine. After a few
minutes she looked up. She was startled to find that the man
was giving her a curious, searching inspection--and that he was
Brent, the playwright--the same fascinating face, keen,
cynical, amused--the same seeing eyes, that, in the Cafe Martin
long ago, had made her feel as if she were being read to her
most secret thought. She dropped her glance.

His voice made her start. "It's been a long time since I've
seen you," he was saying.

She looked up, not believing it possible he was addressing her.
But his gaze was upon her. Thus, she had not been mistaken in
thinking she had seen recognition in his eyes. "Yes," she
said, with a faint smile.

"A longer time for you than for me," said he.

"A good deal has happened to me," she admitted.

"Are you on the stage?"

"No. Not yet."

The girl entered by way of the private door. "Miss Lenox--this
way, please." She saw Brent, became instantly all smiles and
bows. "Oh--Mr. Fitzalan doesn't know you're here, Mr. Brent,"
she cried. Then, to Susan, "Wait a minute."

She was about to reenter the private office when Brent stopped
her with, "Let Miss Lenox go in first. I don't wish to see Mr.
Fitzalan yet." And he stood up, took off his hat, bowed
gravely to Susan, said, "I'm glad to have seen you again."

Susan, with some color forced into her old-ivory skin by
nervousness and amazement, went into the presence of Fitzalan.
As the now obsequious girl closed the door behind her, she
found herself facing a youngish man with a remnant of hair that
was little more than fuzz on the top of his head. His features
were sharp, aggressive, rather hard. He might have sat for the
typical successful American young man of forty--so much younger
in New York than is forty elsewhere in the United States--and so
much older. He looked at Susan with a pleasant sympathetic smile.

"So," said he, "you're taking care of poor Spenser, are you?
Tell him I'll try to run down to see him. I wish I could do
something for him--something worth while, I mean. But--his
request----

"Really, I've nothing of the kind. I couldn't possibly place
you--at least, not at present--perhaps, later on----"

"I understand," interrupted Susan. "He's very ill. It would
help him greatly if you would write him a few lines, saying
you'll give me a place at the first vacancy, but that it may
not be soon. I'll not trouble you again. I want the letter
simply to carry him over the crisis."

Fitzalan hesitated, rubbed his fuzzy crown with his jeweled
hand. "Tell him that," he said, finally. "I'm rather careful
about writing letters. . . . Yes, say to him what you
suggested, as if it was from me."

"The letter will make all the difference between his believing
and not believing," urged Susan. "He has great admiration and
liking for you--thinks you would do anything for him."

Fitzalan frowned; she saw that her insistence had roused--or,
rather, had strengthened--suspicion. "Really--you must excuse
me. What I've heard about him the past year has not----

"But, no matter, I can't do it. You'll let me know how he's
getting on? Good day." And he gave her that polite yet
positive nod of dismissal which is a necessary part of the
equipment of men of affairs, constantly beset as they are and
ever engaged in the battle to save their chief asset, time,
from being wasted.

Susan looked at him--a straight glance from gray eyes, a slight
smile hovering about her scarlet lips. He reddened, fussed
with the papers before him on the desk from which he had not
risen. She opened the door, closed it behind her. Brent was
seated with his back full to her and was busy with his
scribbling. She passed him, went on to the outer door. She
was waiting for his voice; she knew it would come.

"Miss Lenox!"

As she turned he was advancing. His figure, tall and slim and
straight, had the ease of movement which proclaims the man who
has been everywhere and so is at home anywhere. He held out a
card. "I wish to see you on business. You can come at three
this afternoon?"

"Yes," said Susan.

"Thanks," said he, bowing and returning to the table. She went
on into the hall, the card between her fingers. At the
elevator, she stood staring at the name--Robert Brent--as if it
were an inscription in a forgotten language. She was so
absorbed, so dazed that she did not ring the bell. The car
happened to stop at that floor; she entered as if it were
dark. And, in the street, she wandered many blocks down
Broadway before she realized where she was.

She left the elevated and walked eastward through Grand Street.
She was filled with a new and profound dissatisfaction. She
felt like one awakening from a hypnotic trance. The
surroundings, inanimate and animate, that had become endurable
through custom abruptly resumed their original aspect of
squalor and ugliness of repulsion and tragedy. A stranger--the
ordinary, unobservant, feebly imaginative person, going along
those streets would have seen nothing but tawdriness and
poverty. Susan, experienced, imaginative, saw _all_--saw what
another would have seen only after it was pointed out, and even
then but dimly. And that day her vision was no longer staled
and deadened by familiarity, but with vision fresh and with
nerves acute. The men--the women--and, saddest, most tragic of
all, the children! When she entered her room her reawakened
sensitiveness, the keener for its long repose, for the enormous
unconscious absorption of impressions of the life about
her--this morbid sensitiveness of the soul a-clash with its
environment reached its climax. As she threw open the door,
she shrank back before the odor--the powerful, sensual, sweet
odor of chypre so effective in covering the bad smells that
came up from other flats and from the noisome back yards. The
room itself was neat and clean and plain, with not a few
evidences of her personal taste--in the blending of colors, in
the selection of framed photographs on the walls. The one she
especially liked was the largest--a nude woman lying at full
length, her head supported by her arm, her face gazing straight
out of the picture, upon it a baffling expression--of sadness,
of cynicism, of amusement perhaps, of experience, yet of
innocence. It hung upon the wall opposite the door. When she

Susan Lenox, Rise/Fall by David Graham Phillips Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries from the Encyclopedia of the Self by Mark ZimmermanReturn to Part 2 of 4Go to Part 4 of 4

Susan Lenox, Rise/Fall
by David Graham Phillips
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman
Return to Part 2 of 4
Go to Part 4 of 4