第243章

So I'm going to follow them--at least, until I get what I want.""Do you mean to say you've got any respect for yourself?" said Clara."__I__ haven't.And I don't see how any girl in our line can have.""I thought I hadn't," was Susan's reply, "until I talked with--with someone I met the other day.If you slipped and fell in the mud--or were thrown into it--you wouldn't say, `I'm dirty through and through.I can never get clean again'--would you?""But that's different," objected Clara.

"Not a bit," declared Susan."If you look around this world, you'll see that everybody who ever moved about at all has slipped and fallen in the mud--or has been pushed in.""Mostly pushed in."

"Mostly pushed in," assented Susan."And those that have good sense get up as soon as they can, and wash as much of the mud off as'll come off--maybe all--and go on.The fools--they worry about the mud.But not I--not any more!...And not you, my dear--when I get you uptown."Clara was now looking on Susan's departure as a dawn of good luck for herself.She took a headache powder, telephoned for a carriage, and helped carry down the two big packages that contained all Susan's possessions worth moving.And they kissed each other good-by with smiling faces.Susan did not give Clara, the loose-tongued, her new address; nor did Clara, conscious of her own weakness, ask for it.

"Don't put yourself out about me," cried Clara in farewell.

"Get a good tight grip yourself, first."

"That's advice I need," answered Susan."Good-by.

Soon--_soon!_"

The carriage had to move slowly through those narrow tenement streets, so thronged were they with the people swarmed from hot little rooms into the open to try to get a little air that did not threaten to burn and choke as it entered the lungs.

Susan's nostrils were filled with the stenches of animal and vegetable decay--stenches descending in heavy clouds from the open windows of the flats and from the fire escapes crowded with all manner of rubbish; stenches from the rotting, brimful garbage cans; stenches from the groceries and butcher shops and bakeries where the poorest qualities of food were exposed to the contamination of swarms of disgusting fat flies, of mangy, vermin-harassed children and cats and dogs; stenches from the never washed human bodies, clad in filthy garments and drawn out of shape by disease and toil.Sore eyes, scrofula, withered arm or leg, sagged shoulder, hip out of joint--There, crawling along the sidewalk, was the boy whose legs had been cut off by the street car; and the stumps were horribly ulcered.And there at the basement window drooled and cackled the fat idiot girl whose mother sacrificed everything always to dress her freshly in pink.What a world!--where a few people such a very few!--lived in health and comfort and cleanliness--and the millions lived in disease and squalor, ignorant, untouched of civilization save to wear its cast-off clothes and to eat its castaway food and to live in its dark noisome cellars!--And to toil unceasingly to make for others the good things of which they had none themselves!

It made her heartsick--the sadder because nothing could be done about it.Stay and help? As well stay to put out a conflagration barehanded and alone.

As the carriage reached wider Second Avenue, the horses broke into a trot.Susan drew a long breath of the purer air--then shuddered as she saw the corner where the dive into which the cadet had lured her flaunted its telltale awnings.Lower still her spirits sank when she was passing, a few blocks further on, the music hall.There, too, she had had a chance, had let hope blaze high.And she was going forward--into--the region where she had been a slave to Freddie Palmer--no, to the system of which he was a slave no less than she----"I _must_ be strong! I _must!_" Susan said to herself, and there was desperation in the gleam of her eyes, in the set of her chin."This time I will fight! And I feel at last that I can."But her spirits soared no more that day.