Chapter XI…

Chapter 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 business-like.

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 business-like.

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 reënter 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 saw this picture in the department store, she felt at once a sympathy between that woman and herself, felt she was for the first time seeing another soul like her own, one that would have understood her strange sense of innocence in the midst of her own defiled and depraved self--a core of unsullied nature. Everyone else in the world would have mocked at this notion of a something within--a true self to which all that seemed to be her own self was as external as her clothing; this woman of the photograph would understand. So, there she hung--Susan's one prized possession.

The question of dressing for this interview with Brent was most important. Susan gave it much thought before she began to dress, changed her mind again and again in the course of dressing. Through all her vicissitudes she had never lost her interest in the art of dress or her skill at it--and despite the unfavorable surroundings she had steadily improved; any woman anywhere would instantly have recognized her as one of those few favored and envied women who know how to get together a toilet. She finally chose the simplest of the half dozen summer dresses she had made for herself--a plain white lawn, with a short skirt. It gave her an appearance of extreme youth, despite her height and the slight stoop in her shoulders--a mere drooping that harmonized touchingly with the young yet weary expression of her face. To go with the dress she had a large hat of black rough straw with a very little white trimming on it. With this large black hat bewitchingly set upon her gracefully-done dark wavy hair, her sad, dreamy eyes, her pallid skin, her sweet-bitter mouth with its rouged lips seemed to her to show at their best. She felt that nothing was quite so effective for her skin as a white dress. In other colors--though she did not realize--the woman of bought kisses showed more distinctly--never brazenly as in most of the girls, but still unmistakably. In white she took on a glamour of melancholy--and the human countenance is capable of no expression so universally appealing as the look of melancholy that suggests the sadness underlying all life, the pain that pays for pleasure, the pain that pays and gets no pleasure, the sorrow of the passing of all things, the faint foreshadow of the doom awaiting us all. She washed the rouge from her lips, studied the effect in the glass. "No," she said aloud, "without it I feel like a hypocrite--and I don't look half so well." And she put the rouge on again--the scarlet dash drawn startlingly across her strange, pallid face.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

Chapter XII

AT three that afternoon she stood in the vestibule of Brent's small house in Park Avenue overlooking the oblong of green between East Thirty-seventh Street and East Thirty-eighth. A most reputable looking Englishman in evening dress opened the door; from her reading and her theater-going she knew that this was a butler. He bowed her in. The entire lower floor was given to an entrance hall, done in plain black walnut, almost lofty of ceiling, and with a grand stairway leading to the upper part of the house. There was a huge fireplace to the right; a mirror filled the entire back wall; a broad low seat ran all round the room. In one corner, an enormous urn of dark pottery; in another corner, a suit of armor, the helmet, the breastplate and the gauntlets set with gold of ancient lackluster.

The butler left her there and ascended the polished but dead-finished stairway noiselessly. Susan had never before been in so grand a room. The best private house she had ever seen was Wright's in Sutherland; and while everybody else in Sutherland thought it magnificent, she had felt that there was something wrong, what she had not known. The grandiose New York hotels and restaurants were more showy and more pretentious far than this interior of Brent's. But her unerring instinct of those born with good taste knew at first view of them that they were simply costly; there were beautiful things in them, fine carvings and paintings and tapestries, but personality was lacking. And without personality there can be no unity; without unity there can be no harmony--and without harmony, no beauty.

Looking round her now, she had her first deep draught of esthetic delight in interior decoration. She loved this quiet dignity, this large simplicity--nothing that obtruded, nothing that jarred, everything on the same scale of dark coloring and large size. She admired the way the mirror, without pretense of being anything but a mirror, enhanced the spaciousness of the room and doubled the pleasure it gave by offering another and different view of it.

Last of all Susan caught sight of herself--a slim, slightly stooped figure, its white dress and its big black hat with white trimmings making it stand out strongly against the rather somber background. In a curiously impersonal way her own sad, wistful face interested her. A human being's face is a summary of his career. No man can realize at a thought what he is, can epitomize in just proportion what has been made of him by experience of the multitude of moments of which life is composed. But in some moods and in some lights we do get such an all-comprehending view of ourselves in looking at our own faces. As she had instinctively felt, there was a world of meaning in the contrast between her pensive brow above melancholy eyes and the blood-red line of her rouged lips.

The butler descended. "Mr. Brent is in his library, on the fourth floor," said he. "Will you kindly step this way, ma'am?"

Instead of indicating the stairway, he went to the panel next the chimney piece. She saw that it was a hidden door admitting to an elevator. She entered; the door closed; the elevator ascended rapidly. When it came to a stop the door opened and she was facing Brent.

"Thank you for coming," said he, with almost formal courtesy.

For all her sudden shyness, she cast a quick but seeing look round. It was an overcast day; the soft floods of liquid light--the beautiful light of her beloved City of the Sun--poured into the big room through an enormous window of clear glass which formed the entire north wall. Round the other walls from floor almost to lofty ceiling were books in solid rows; not books with ornamental bindings, but books for use, books that had been and were being used. By way of furniture there were an immense lounge, wide and long and deep, facing the left chimney piece, an immense table desk facing the north light, three great chairs with tall backs, one behind the table, one near the end of the table, the third in the corner farthest from the window; a grand piano, open, with music upon its rack, and a long carved seat at its keyboard. The huge window had a broad sill upon which was built a generous window garden fresh and lively with bright flowers. The woodwork, the ceiling, the furniture were of mahogany. The master of this splendid simplicity was dressed in a blue house suit of some summer material like linen. He was smoking a cigarette, and offered her one from the great carved wood box filled with them on the table desk.

"Thanks," said she. And when she had lighted it and was seated facing him as he sat at his desk, she felt almost at her ease. After all, while his gaze was penetrating, it was also understanding; we do not mind being unmasked if the unmasker at once hails us as brother. Brent's eyes seemed to say to her, "Human!--like me." She smoked and let her gaze wander from her books to window garden, from window garden to piano.

"You play?" said he.

"A very little. Enough for accompaniments to simple songs."

"You sing?"

"Simple songs. I've had but a few lessons from a small-town teacher."

"Let me hear."

She went to the piano, laid her cigarette in a tray ready beside the music rack. She gave him the "Gipsy Queen," which she liked because it expressed her own passion of revolt against restraints of every conventional kind and her love for the open air and open sky. He somehow took away all feeling of embarrassment; she felt so strongly that he understood and was big enough not to have it anywhere in him to laugh at anything sincere. When she finished she resumed her cigarette and returned to the chair near his.

"It's as I thought," said he. "Your voice can be trained--to speak, I mean. I don't know as to its singing value. . . . Have you good health?"

"I never have even colds. Yes, I'm strong."

"You'll need it."

"I have needed it," said she. Into her face came the sad, bitter expression with its curious relief of a faint cynical smile.

He leaned back in his chair and looked at her through a cloud of smoke. She saw that his eyes were not gray, as she had thought, but brown, a hazel brown with points of light sparkling in the irises and taking away all the suggestion of weakness and sentimentality that makes pure brown eyes unsatisfactory in a man. He said slowly:

"When I saw you--in the Martin--you were on the way down. You went, I see."

She nodded. "I'm still there."

"You like it? You wish to stay?"

She shook her head smilingly. "No, but I can stay if it's necessary. I've discovered that I've got the health and the nerves for anything."

"That's a great discovery. . . . Well, you'll soon be on your way up. . . . Do you wish to know why I spoke to you this morning?--Why I remembered you?"

"Why?"

"Because of the expression of your eyes--when your face is in repose."

She felt no shyness--and no sense of necessity of responding to a compliment, for his tone forbade any thought of flattery. She lowered her gaze to conceal the thoughts his words brought--the memories of the things that had caused her eyes to look as Rod and now Brent said.

"Such an expression," the playwright went on, "must mean character. I am sick and tired of the vanity of these actresses who can act just enough never to be able to learn to act well. I'm going to try an experiment with you. I've tried it several times but--No matter. I'm not discouraged. I never give up. . . . Can you stand being alone?"

"I spend most of my time alone. I prefer it."

"I thought so. Yes--you'll do. Only the few who can stand being alone ever get anywhere. Everything worth while is done alone. The big battle--it isn't fought in the field, but by the man sitting alone in his tent, working it all out. The bridge--the tunnel through the great mountains--the railway--the huge business enterprise--all done by the man alone, thinking, plotting to the last detail. It's the same way with the novel, the picture, the statue, the play--writing it, acting it--all done by someone alone, shut in with his imagination and his tools. I saw that you were one of the lonely ones. All you need is a chance. You'd surely get it, sooner or later. Perhaps I can bring it a little sooner. . . . How much do you need to live on?"

"I must have fifty dollars a week--if I go on at--as I am now. If you wish to take all my time--then, forty."

He smiled in a puzzled way.

"The police," she explained. "I need ten----"

"Certainly--certainly," cried he. "I understand--perfectly. How stupid of me! I'll want all your time. So it's to be forty dollars a week. When can you begin?"

Susan reflected. "I can't go into anything that'll mean a long time," she said. "I'm waiting for a man--a friend of mine to get well. Then we're going to do something together."

Brent made an impatient gesture. "An actor? Well, I suppose I can get him something to do. But I don't want you to be under the influence of any of these absurd creatures who think they know what acting is--when they merely know how to dress themselves in different suits of clothes, and strut themselves about the stage. They'd rather die than give up their own feeble, foolish little identities. I'll see that your actor friend is taken care of, but you must keep away from him--for the time at least."

"He's all I've got. He's an old friend."

"You--care for him?"

"I used to. And lately I found him again--after we had been separated a long time. We're going to help each other up."

"Oh--he's down and out oh? Why?"

"Drink--and hard luck."

"Not hard luck. That helps a man. It has helped you. It has made you what you are."

"What am I?" asked Susan.

Brent smiled mysteriously. "That's what we're going to find out," said he. "There's no human being who has ever had a future unless he or she had a past--and the severer the past the more splendid the future."

Susan was attending with all her senses. This man was putting into words her own inarticulate instincts.

"A past," he went on in his sharp, dogmatic way, "either breaks or makes. You go into the crucible a mere ore, a possibility. You come out slag or steel." He was standing now, looking down at her with quizzical eyes. "You're about due to leave the pot," said he.

"And I've hopes that you're steel. If not----" He shrugged his shoulders--"You'll have had forty a week for your time, and I'll have gained useful experience."

Susan gazed at him as if she doubted her eyes and ears.

"What do you want me to do?" she presently inquired.

"Learn the art of acting--which consists of two parts. First, you must learn to act--thousands of the profession do that. Second, you must learn not to act--and so far I know there aren't a dozen in the whole world who've got that far along. I've written a play I think well of. I want to have it done properly--it, and several other plays I intend to write. I'm going to give you a chance to become famous--better still, great."

Susan looked at him incredulously. "Do you know who I am?" she asked at last.

"Certainly."

Her eyes lowered, the faintest tinge of red changed the amber-white pallor of her cheeks, her bosom rose and fell quickly.

"I don't mean," he went on, "that I know any of the details of your experience. I only know the results as they are written in your face. The details are unimportant. When I say I know who you are, I mean I know that you are a woman who has suffered, whose heart has been broken by suffering, but not her spirit. Of where you came from or how you've lived, I know nothing. And it's none of my business--no more than it's the public's business where I came from and how I've learned to write plays."

Well, whether he was guessing any part of the truth or all of it, certainly what she had said about the police and now this sweeping statement of his attitude toward her freed her of the necessity of disclosing herself. She eagerly tried to dismiss the thoughts that had been making her most uneasy. She said:

"You think I can learn to act?"

"That, of course," replied he. "Any intelligent person can learn to act--and also most persons who have no more intelligence in their heads than they have in their feet. I'll guarantee you some sort of career. What I'm interested to find out is whether you can learn not to act. I believe you can. But----" He laughed in self-mockery. "I've made several absurd mistakes in that direction. . . . You have led a life in which most women become the cheapest sort of liars--worse liars even than is the usual respectable person, because they haven't the restraint of fearing loss of reputation. Why is it you have not become a liar?"

Susan laughed. "I'm sure I don't know. Perhaps because lying is such a tax on the memory. May I have another cigarette?"

He held the match for her. "You don't paint--except your lips," he went on, "though you have no color. And you don't wear cheap finery. And while you use a strong scent, it's not one of the cheap and nasty kind--it's sensual without being slimy. And you don't use the kind of words one always hears in your circle."

Susan looked immensely relieved. "Then you do know who I am!" she cried.

"You didn't suppose I thought you fresh from a fashionable boarding school, did you? I'd hardly look there for an actress who could act. You've got experience--experience--experience--written all over your face--sadly, satirically, scornfully, gayly, bitterly. And what I want is experience--not merely having been through things, but having been through them understandingly. You'll help me in my experiment?"

He looked astonished, then irritated, when the girl, instead of accepting eagerly, drew back in her chair and seemed to be debating. His irritation showed still more plainly when she finally said:

"That depends on him. And he--he thinks you don't like him."

"What's his name?" said Brent in his abrupt, intense fashion. "What's his name?"

"Spenser--Roderick Spenser."

Brent looked vague.

"He used to be on the Herald. He writes plays."

"Oh--yes. I remember. He's a weak fool."

Susan abruptly straightened, an ominous look in eyes and brow.

Brent made an impatient gesture. "Beg pardon. Why be sensitive about him? Obviously because you know I'm right. I said fool, not ass. He's clever, but ridiculously vain. I don't dislike him. I don't care anything about him--or about anybody else in the world. No man does who amounts to anything. With a career it's as Jesus said--leave father and mother, husband and wife--land, ox everything--and follow it."

"What for?" said Susan.

"To save your soul! To be a somebody; to be strong. To be able to give to anybody and everybody--whatever they need. To be happy."

"Are you happy?"

"No," he admitted. "But I'm growing in that direction. . . . Don't waste yourself on Stevens--I beg pardon, Spenser. You're bigger than that. He's a small man with large dreams--a hopeless misfit. Small dreams for small men; large dreams for--" he laughed--"you and me--our sort."

Susan echoed his laugh, but faint-heartedly. "I've watched your name in the papers," she said, sincerely unconscious of flattery. "I've seen you grow more and more famous. But--if there had been anything in me, would I have gone down and down?"

"How old are you?"

"About twenty-one."

"Only twenty-one and that look in your face! Magnificent! I don't believe I'm to be disappointed this time. You ask why you've gone down! You haven't. You've gone through."

"Down," she insisted, sadly.

"Nonsense! The soot'll rub off the steel."

She lifted her head eagerly. Her own secret thought put into words.

"You can't make steel without soot and dirt. You can't make anything without dirt. That's why the nice, prim, silly world's full of cabinets exhibiting little chips of raw material polished up neatly in one or two spots. That's why there are so few men and women--and those few have had to make themselves, or are made by accident. You're an accident, I suppose. The women who amount to anything usually are. The last actress I tried to do anything with might have become a somebody if it hadn't been for one thing: She had a hankering for respectability--a yearning to be a society person--to be thought well of by society people. It did for her."

"I'll not sink on that rock," said Susan cheerfully.

"No secret longing for social position?"

"None. Even if I would, I couldn't."

"That's one heavy handicap out of the way. But I'll not let myself begin to hope until I find out whether you've got incurable and unteachable vanity. If you have--then, no hope. If you haven't--there's a fighting chance."

"You forget my compact," Susan reminded him.

"Oh--the lover--Spenser."

Brent reflected, strolled to the big window, his hands deep in his pockets. Susan took advantage of his back to give way to her own feelings of utter amazement and incredulity. She certainly was not dreaming. And the man gazing out at the window was certainly flesh and blood--a great man, if voluble and eccentric. Perhaps to act and speak as one pleased was one of the signs of greatness, one of its perquisites. Was he amusing himself with her? Was he perchance taken with her physically and employing these extraordinary methods as ways of approach? She had seen many peculiarities of sex-approach in men--some grotesque, many terrible, all beyond comprehension. Was this another such?

He wheeled suddenly, surprised her eyes upon him. He burst out laughing, and she felt that he had read her thoughts. However, he merely said:

"Have you anything to suggest--about Spenser?"

"I can't even tell him of your offer now. He's very ill--and sensitive about you."

"About me? How ridiculous! I'm always coming across men I don't know who are full of venom toward me. I suppose he thinks I crowded him. No matter. You're sure you're not fancying yourself in love with him?"

"No, I am not in love with him. He has changed--and so have I."

He smiled at her. "Especially in the last hour?" he suggested.

"I had changed before that. I had been changing right along. But I didn't realize it fully until you talked with me--no, until after you gave me your card this morning."

"You saw a chance--a hope--eh?"

She nodded.

"And at once became all nerves and courage. . . . As to Spenser--I'll have some play carpenter sent to collaborate with him and set him up in the play business. You know it's a business as well as an art. And the chromos sell better than the oil paintings--except the finest ones. It's my chromos that have earned me the means and the leisure to try oils."

"He'd never consent. He's very proud."

"Vain, you mean. Pride will consent to anything as a means to an end. It's vanity that's squeamish and haughty. He needn't know."

"But I couldn't discuss any change with him until he's much better."

"I'll send the play carpenter to him--get Fitzalan to send one of his carpenters." Brent smiled. "You don't think he'll hang back because of the compact, do you?"

Susan flushed painfully. "No," she admitted in a low voice.

Brent was still smiling at her, and the smile was cynical. But his tone soothed where his words would have wounded, as he went on: "A man of his sort--an average, 'there-are-two-kinds-of-women, good-and-bad' sort of man--has but one use for a woman of your sort."

"I know that," said Susan.

"Do you mind it?"

"Not much. I'd not mind it at all if I felt that I was somebody."

Brent put his hand on her shoulder. "You'll do, Miss Lenox," he said with quiet heartiness. "You may not be so big a somebody as you and I would like. But you'll count as one, all right."

She looked at him with intense appeal in her eyes. "Why?" she said earnestly. "Why do you do this?"

He smiled gravely down at her--as gravely as Brent could smile--with the quizzical suggestion never absent from his handsome face, so full of life and intelligence. "I've been observing your uneasiness," said he. "Now listen. It would be impossible for you to judge me, to understand me. You are young and as yet small. I am forty, and have lived twenty-five of my forty years intensely. So, don't fall into the error of shallow people and size me up by your own foolish little standards. Do you see what I mean?"

Susan's candid face revealed her guilt. "Yes," said she, rather humbly.

"I see you do understand," said he. "And that's a good sign. Most people, hearing what I said, would have disregarded it as merely my vanity, would have gone on with their silly judging, would have set me down as a conceited ass who by some accident had got a reputation. But to proceed--I have not chosen you on impulse. Long and patient study has made me able to judge character by the face, as a horse dealer can judge horses by looking at them. I don't need to read every line of a book to know whether it's wise or foolish, worth while or not. I don't need to know a human being for years or for hours or for minutes even, before I can measure certain things. I measured you. It's like astronomy. An astronomer wants to get the orbit of a star. He takes its position twice--and from the two observations he can calculate the orbit to the inch. I've got three observations of your orbit. Enough--and to spare."

"I shan't misunderstand again," said Susan.

"One thing more," insisted Brent. "In our relations, we are to be not man and woman, but master and pupil. I shan't waste your time with any--other matters."

It was Susan's turn to laugh. "That's your polite way of warning me not to waste any of your time with--other matters."

"Precisely," conceded he. "A man in my position--a man in any sort of position, for that matter--is much annoyed by women trying to use their sex with him. I wished to make it clear at the outset that----"

"That I could gain nothing by neglecting the trade of actress for the trade of woman," interrupted Susan. "I understand perfectly."

He put out his hand. "I see that at least we'll get on together. I'll have Fitzalan send the carpenter to your friend at once."

"Today!" exclaimed Susan, in surprise and delight.

"Why not?" He arranged paper and pen. "Sit here and write Spenser's address, and your own. Your salary begins with today. I'll have my secretary mail you a check. And as soon as I can see you again, I'll send you a telegram. Meanwhile--" He rummaged among a lot of paper bound plays on the table "Here's 'Cavalleria Rusticana.' Read it with a view to yourself as either Santuzzao or Lola. Study her first entrance--what you would do with it. Don't be frightened. I expect nothing from you--nothing whatever. I'm glad you know nothing about acting. You'll have the less to unlearn."

They had been moving towards the elevator. He shook hands again and, after adjusting the mechanism for the descent, closed the door. As it was closing she saw in his expression that his mind had already dismissed her for some one of the many other matters that crowded his life.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

Chapter XIII

THE Susan Lenox who left Delancey Street at half past two that afternoon to call upon Robert Brent was not the Susan Lenox who returned to Delancey Street at half-past five. A man is wandering, lost in a cave, is groping this way and that in absolute darkness, with flagging hope and fainting strength--has reached the point where he wonders at his own folly in keeping on moving--is persuading himself that the sensible thing would be to lie down and give up. He sees a gleam of light. Is it a reality? Is it an illusion--one more of the illusions that have lured him on and on? He does not know; but instantly a fire sweeps through him, warming his dying strength into vigor.

So it was with Susan.

The pariah class--the real pariah class--does not consist of merely the women formally put beyond the pale for violations of conventional morality and the men with the brand of thief or gambler upon them. Our social, our industrial system has made it far vaster. It includes almost the whole population--all those who sell body or brain or soul in an uncertain market for uncertain hire, to gain the day's food and clothing, the night's shelter. This vast mass floats hither and yon on the tides and currents of destiny. Now it halts, resting sluggishly in a dead calm; again it moves, sometimes slowly, sometimes under the lash of tempest. But it is ever the same vast inertia, with no particle of it possessing an aim beyond keeping afloat and alive. Susan had been an atom, a spray of weed, in this Sargasso Sea.

If you observe a huge, unwieldy crowd so closely packed that nothing can be done with it and it can do nothing with itself, you will note three different types. There are the entirely inert--and they make up most of the crowd. They do not resist; they helplessly move this way and that as the chance waves of motion prompt. Of this type is the overwhelming majority of the human race. Here and there in the mass you will see examples of a second type. These are individuals who are restive and resentful under the sense of helplessness and impotence. They struggle now gently, now furiously. They thrust backward or forward or to one side. They thresh about. But nothing comes of their efforts beyond a brief agitation, soon dying away in ripples. The inertia of the mass and their own lack of purpose conquer them. Occasionally one of these grows so angry and so violent that the surrounding inertia quickens into purpose--the purpose of making an end of this agitation which is serving only to increase the general discomfort. And the agitator is trampled down, disappears, perhaps silently, perhaps with groan or shriek. Continue to look at this crowd, so pitiful, so terrible, such a melancholy waste of incalculable power--continue to observe and you may chance upon an example of the third type. You are likely at first to confuse the third type with the second, for they seem to be much alike. Here and there, of the resentful strugglers, will be one whose resentment is intelligent. He struggles, but it is not aimless struggle. He has seen or suspected in a definite direction a point where he would be more or less free, perhaps entirely free. He realizes how he is hemmed in, realizes how difficult, how dangerous, will be his endeavor to get to that point. And he proceeds to try to minimize or overcome the difficulties, the dangers. He struggles now gently, now earnestly, now violently--but always toward his fixed objective. He is driven back, to one side, is almost overwhelmed. He causes commotions that threaten to engulf him, and must pause or retreat until they have calmed. You may have to watch him long before you discover that, where other strugglers have been aimless, he aims and resolves. And little by little he gains, makes progress toward his goal--and once in a long while one such reaches that goal. It is triumph, success.

Susan, young, inexperienced, dazed; now too despondent, now too hopeful; now too gentle and again too infuriated--Susan had been alternating between inertia and purposeless struggle. Brent had given her the thing she lacked--had given her a definite, concrete, tangible purpose. He had shown her the place where, if she should arrive, she might be free of that hideous slavery of the miserable mass; and he had inspired her with the hope that she could reach it.

And that was the Susan Lenox who came back to the little room in Delancey Street at half-past five.

Curiously, while she was thinking much about Brent, she was thinking even more about Burlingham--about their long talks on the show boat and in their wanderings in Louisville and Cincinnati. His philosophy, his teachings--the wisdom he had, but was unable to apply--began to come back to her. It was not strange that she should remember it, for she had admired him intensely and had listened to his every word, and she was then at the time when the memory takes its clearest and strongest impressions. The strangeness lay in the suddenness with which Burlingham, so long dead, suddenly came to life, changed from a sad and tender memory to a vivid possibility, advising her, helping her, urging her on.

Clara, dressed to go to dinner with her lover, was waiting to arrange about their meeting to make together the usual rounds in the evening. "I've got an hour before I'm due at the hospital," said Susan. "Let's go down to Kelly's for a drink."

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

"Nothing."

"Your fellow's not had a relapse?"

"No--nothing."

"Need some money? I can lend you ten. I did have twenty, but I gave Sallie and that little Jew girl who's her side partner ten for the bail bondsman. They got pinched last night for not paying up to the police. They've gone crazy about that prize fighter--at least, he thinks he is--that Joe O'Mara, and they're giving him every cent they make. It's funny about Sallie. She's a Catholic and goes to mass regular. And she keeps straight on Sunday--no money'll tempt her--I've seen it tried. Do you want the ten?"

"No. I've got plenty."

"We must look in at that Jolly Rovers' ball tonight. There'll be a lot of fellows with money there.

"We can sure pull off something pretty good. Anyhow, we'll have fun. But you don't care for the dances. Well, they are a waste of time. And because the men pay for a few bum drinks and dance with a girl, they don't want to give up anything more. How's she to live, I want to know?"

"Would you like to get out of this, Clara?" interrupted Susan, coming out of her absent-mindedness.

"Would I! But what's the use of talking?"

"But I mean, would you really?"

"Oh--if there was something better. But is there? I don't see how I'd be as well off, respectable. As I said to the rescue woman, what is there in it for a 'reclaimed' girl, as they call it? When they ask a man to reform they can offer him something--and he can go on up and up. But not for girls. Nothing doing but charity and pity and the second table and the back door. I can make more money at this and have a better time, as long as my looks last. And I've turned down already a couple of chances to marry--men that wouldn't have looked at me if I'd been in a store or a factory or living out. I may marry."

"Don't do that," said Susan. "Marriage makes brutes of men, and slaves of women."

"You speak as if you knew."

"I do," said Susan, in a tone that forbade question.

"I ain't exactly stuck on the idea myself," pursued Clara. "And if I don't, why when my looks are gone, where am I worse off than I'd be at the same age as a working girl? If I have to get a job then, I can get it--and I'll not be broken down like the respectable women at thirty--those that work or those that slop round boozing and neglecting their children while their husbands work. Of course, there's chances against you in this business. But so there is in every business. Suppose I worked in a factory and lost a leg in the machinery, like that girl of Mantell, the bricklayer's? Suppose I get an awful disease--to hear some people talk you'd think there wasn't any chances of death or horrible diseases at respectable work. Why, how could anybody be worse off than if they got lung trouble and boils as big as your fist like those girls over in the tobacco factory?"

"You needn't tell me about work," said Susan. "The streets are full of wrecks from work--and the hospitals--and the graveyard over on the Island. You can always go to that slavery. But I mean a respectable life, with everything better."

"Has one of those swell women from uptown been after you?"

"No. This isn't a pious pipe dream."

"You sound like it. One of them swell silk smarties got at me when I was in the hospital with the fever. She was a bird--she was. She handed me a line of grand talk, and I, being sort of weak with sickness, took it in. Well, when she got right down to business, what did she want me to do? Be a dressmaker or a lady's maid. Me work twelve, fourteen, God knows how many hours--be too tired to have any fun--travel round with dead ones--be a doormat for a lot of cheap people that are tryin' to make out they ain't human like the rest of us. Me! And when I said, 'No, thank you,' what do you think?"

"Did she offer to get you a good home in the country?" said Susan.

"That was it. The country! The nerve of her! But I called her bluff, all right, all right. I says to her, 'Are you going to the country to live?' And she reared at me daring to question her, and said she wasn't. 'You'd find it dead slow, wouldn't you?' says I. And she kind o' laughed and looked almost human. 'Then,' says I, 'no more am I going to the country. I'll take my chances in little old New York,' I says."

"I should think so!" exclaimed Susan.

"I'd like to be respectable, if I could afford it. But there's nothing in that game for poor girls unless they haven't got no looks to sell and have to sell the rest of themselves for some factory boss to get rich off of while they get poorer and weaker every day. And when they say 'God' to me, I say, 'Who's he? He must be somebody that lives up on Fifth Avenue. We ain't seen him down our way.'"

"I mean, go on the stage," resumed Susan.

"I wouldn't mind, if I could get in right. Everything in this world depends on getting in right. I was born four flights up in a tenement, and I've been in wrong ever since."

"I was in wrong from the beginning, too," said Susan, thoughtfully. "In wrong--that's it exactly." Clara's eyes again became eager with the hope of a peep into the mystery of Susan's origin. But Susan went on, "Yes, I've always been in wrong. Always."

"Oh, no," declared Clara. "You've got education--and manners--and ladylike instincts. I'm at home here. I was never so well off in my life. I'm, you might say, on my way up in the world. Most of us girls are--like the fellow that ain't got nothing to eat or no place to sleep and gets into jail--he's better off, ain't he? But you--you don't belong here at all."

"I belong anywhere--and everywhere--and nowhere," said Susan. "Yes, I belong here. I've got a chance uptown. If it pans out, I'll let you in."

Clara looked at her wistfully. Clara had a wicked temper when she was in liquor, and had the ordinary human proneness to lying, to mischievous gossip, and to utter laziness. The life she led, compelling cleanliness and neatness and a certain amount of thrift under penalty of instant ruin, had done her much good in saving her from going to pieces and becoming the ordinary sloven and drag on the energies of some man. "Lorna," she now said, "I do believe you like me a little." "More than that," Susan assured her. "You've saved me from being hard-hearted. I must go to the hospital. So long!"

"How about this evening?" asked Clara.

"I'm staying in. I've got something to do."

"Well--I may be home early--unless I go to the ball."

Susan was refused admittance at the hospital. Spenser, they said, had received a caller, had taxed his strength enough for the day. Nor would it be worth while to return in the morning. The same caller was coming again. Spenser had said she was to come in the afternoon. She received this cheerfully, yet not without a certain sense of hurt--which, however, did not last long.

When she was admitted to Spenser the following afternoon, she faced him guiltily--for the thoughts Brent had set to bubbling and boiling in her. And her guilt showed in the tone of her greeting, in the reluctance and forced intensity of her kiss and embrace. She had compressed into the five most receptive years of a human being's life an experience that was, for one of her intelligence and education, equal to many times five years of ordinary life. And this experience had developed her instinct for concealing her deep feelings into a fixed habit. But it had not made her a liar--had not robbed her of her fundamental courage and self-respect which made her shrink in disdain from deceiving anyone who seemed to her to have the right to frankness. Spenser, she felt as always, had that right--this, though he had not been frank with her; still, that was a matter for his own conscience and did not affect her conscience as to what was courageous and honorable toward him. So, had he been observing, he must have seen that something was wrong. But he was far too excited about his own affairs to note her.

"My luck's turned!" cried he, after kissing her with enthusiasm. "Fitzalan has sent Jack Sperry to me, and we're to collaborate on a play. I told you Fitz was the real thing."

Susan turned hastily away to hide her telltale face.

"Who's Sperry?" asked she, to gain time for self-control.

"Oh, He's a play-smith--and a bear at it. He has knocked together half a dozen successes. He'll supply the trade experience that I lack, and Fitzalan will be sure to put on our piece."

"You're a lot better--aren't you?"

"Better? I'm almost well."

He certainly had made a sudden stride toward health. By way of doing something progressive he had had a shave, and that had restored the look of youth to his face--or, rather, had uncovered it. A strong, handsome face it was--much handsomer than Brent's--and with the subtle, moral weakness of optimistic vanity well concealed. Yes, much handsomer than Brent's, which wasn't really handsome at all--yet was superbly handsomer, also--the handsomeness that comes from being through and through a somebody. She saw again why she had cared for Rod so deeply; but she also saw why she could not care again, at least not in that same absorbed, self-effacing way. Physical attraction--yes. And a certain remnant of the feeling of comradeship, too. But never again utter belief, worshipful admiration--or any other degree of belief or admiration beyond the mild and critical. She herself had grown. Also, Brent's penetrating and just analysis of Spenser had put clearly before her precisely what he was--precisely what she herself had been vaguely thinking of him.

As he talked on and on of Sperry's visit and the new projects, she listened, looking at his character in the light Brent had turned upon it--Brent who had in a few brief moments turned such floods of light upon so many things she had been seeing dimly or not at all. Moderate prosperity and moderate adversity bring out the best there is in a man; the extreme of either brings out his worst. The actual man is the best there is in him, and not the worst, but it is one of the tragedies of life that those who have once seen his worst ever afterward have sense of it chiefly, and cannot return to the feeling they had for him when his worst was undreamed of. "I'm not in love with Brent," thought Susan. "But having known him, I can't ever any more care for Rod. He seems small beside Brent--and he is small."

Spenser in his optimistic dreaming aloud had reached a point where it was necessary to assign Susan a role in his dazzling career. "You'll not have to go on the stage," said he. "I'll look out for you. By next week Sperry and I will have got together a scenario for the play and when Sperry reads it to Fitzalan we'll get an advance of at least five hundred. So you and I will take a nice room and bath uptown--as a starter--and we'll be happy again--happier than before."

"No, I'm going to support myself," said Susan promptly.

"Trash!" cried Spenser, smiling tenderly at her. "Do you suppose I'd allow you to mix up in stage life? You've forgotten how jealous I am of you. You don't know what I've suffered since I've been here sick, brooding over what you're doing, to----"

She laid her fingers on his lips. "What's the use of fretting about anything that has to be?" said she, smilingly. "I'm going to support myself. You may as well make up your mind to it."

"Plenty of time to argue that out," said he, and his tone forecast his verdict on the arguing. And he changed the subject by saying, "I see you still cling to your fad of looking fascinating about the feet. That was one of the reasons I never could trust you. A girl with as charming feet and ankles as you have, and so much pride in getting them up well, simply cannot be trustworthy." He laughed. "No, you were made to be taken care of, my dear."

She did not press the matter. She had taken her stand; that was enough for the present. After an hour with him, she went home to get herself something to eat on her gas stove. Spenser's confidence in the future did not move her even to the extent of laying out half a dollar on a restaurant dinner. Women have the habit of believing in the optimistic outpourings of egotistical men, and often hasten men along the road to ruin by proclaiming this belief and acting upon it. But not intelligent women of experience; that sort of woman, by checking optimistic husbands, fathers, sons, lovers, has even put off ruin--sometimes until death has had the chance to save the optimist from the inevitable consequence of his folly. When she finished her chop and vegetable, instead of lighting a cigarette and lingering over a cup of black coffee she quickly straightened up and began upon the play Brent had given her. She had read it several times the night before, and again and again during the day. But not until now did she feel sufficiently calmed down from her agitations of thought and emotion to attack the play understandingly.

Thanks to defective education the most enlightened of us go through life much like a dim-sighted man who has no spectacles. Almost the whole of the wonderful panorama of the universe is unseen by us, or, if seen, is but partially understood or absurdly misunderstood. When it comes to the subtler things, the things of science and art, rarely indeed is there anyone who has the necessary training to get more than the crudest, most imperfect pleasure from them. What little training we have is so limping that it spoils the charm of mystery with which savage ignorance invests the universe from blade of grass to star, and does not put in place of that broken charm the profounder and loftier joy of understanding. To take for illustration the most widely diffused of all the higher arts and sciences, reading: How many so-called "educated" people can read understandingly even a novel, the form of literature designed to make the least demand upon the mind? People say they have read, but, when questioned, they show that they have got merely a glimmering of the real action, the faintest hint of style and characterization, have perhaps noted some stray epigram which they quote with evidently faulty grasp of its meaning.

When the thing read is a play, almost no one can get from it a coherent notion of what it is about. Most of us have nothing that can justly be called imagination; our early training at home and at school killed in the shoot that finest plant of the mind's garden. So there is no ability to fill in the picture which the dramatic author draws in outline. Susan had not seen "Cavalleria Rusticana" either as play or as opera. But when she and Spenser were together in Forty-fourth Street, she had read plays and had dreamed over them; the talk had been almost altogether of plays--of writing plays, of constructing scenes, of productions, of acting, of all the many aspects of the theater. Spenser read scenes to her, got her to help him with criticism, and she was present when he went over his work with Drumley, Riggs, Townsend and the others. Thus, reading a play was no untried art to her.

She read "Cavalleria" through slowly, taking about an hour to it. She saw now why Brent had given it to her as the primer lesson--the simple, elemental story of a peasant girl's ruin under promise of marriage; of her lover's wearying of one who had only crude physical charm; of his being attracted by a young married woman, gay as well as pretty, offering the security in intrigue that an unmarried woman could not offer. Such a play is at once the easiest and the hardest to act--the easiest because every audience understands it perfectly and supplies unconsciously almost any defect in the acting; the hardest because any actor with the education necessary to acting well finds it next to impossible to divest himself or herself of the sophistications of education and get back to the elemental animal.

Santuzza or Lola? Susan debated. Santuzza was the big and easy part; Lola, the smaller part, was of the kind that is usually neglected. But Susan saw possibilities in the character of the woman who won Turiddu away--the triumphant woman. The two women represented the two kinds of love--the love that is serious, the love that is light. And experience had taught her why it is that human nature soon tires of intensity, turns to frivolity. She felt that, if she could act, she would try to show that not Turiddu's fickleness nor his contempt of the woman who had yielded, but Santuzza's sad intensity and Lola's butterfly gayety had cost Santuzza her lover and her lover his life. So, it was not Santuzza's but Lola's first entrance that she studied.

In the next morning's mail, under cover addressed "Miss Susan Lenox, care of Miss Lorna Sackville," as she had written it for Brent, came the promised check for forty dollars. It was signed John P. Garvey, Secretary, and was inclosed with a note bearing the same signature:

DEAR MADAM:

Herewith I send you a check for forty dollars for the first week's salary under your arrangement with Mr. Brent. No receipt is necessary. Until further notice a check for the same amount will be mailed you each Thursday. Unless you receive notice to the contrary, please call as before, at three o'clock next Wednesday.

It made her nervous to think of those five days before she should see Brent. He had assured her he would expect nothing from her; but she felt she must be able to show him that she had not been wasting her time--his time, the time for which he was paying nearly six dollars a day. She must work every waking hour, except the two hours each day at the hospital. She recalled what Brent had said about the advantage of being contented alone--and how everything worth doing must be done in solitude. She had never thought about her own feelings as to company and solitude, as it was not her habit to think about herself. But now she realized how solitary she had been, and how it had bred in her habits of thinking and reading--and how valuable these habits would be to her in her work. There was Rod, for example. He hated being alone, must have someone around even when he was writing; and he had no taste for order or system. She understood why it was so hard for him to stick at anything, to put anything through to the finish. With her fondness for being alone, with her passion for reading and thinking about what she read, surely she ought soon to begin to accomplish something--if there was any ability in her.

She found Rod in higher spirits. Several ideas for his play had come to him; he already saw it acted, successful, drawing crowded houses, bringing him in anywhere from five hundred to a thousand a week. She was not troubled hunting for things to talk about with him--she, who could think of but one thing and that a secret from him. He talked his play, a steady stream with not a seeing glance at her or a question about her. She watched the little clock at the side of the bed. At the end of an hour to the minute, she interrupted him in the middle of a sentence. "I must go now," said she, rising.

"Sit down," he cried. "You can stay all day. The doctor says it will do me good to have you to talk with. And Sperry isn't coming until tomorrow."

"I can't do it," said she. "I must go."

He misunderstood her avoiding glance. "Now, Susie--sit down there," commanded he. "We've got plenty of money. You--you needn't bother about it any more."

"We're not settled yet," said she. "Until we are, I'd not dare take the risk." She was subtly adroit by chance, not by design.

"Risk!" exclaimed he angrily. "There's no risk. I've as good as got the advance money. Sit down."

She hesitated. "Don't be angry," pleaded she in a voice that faltered. "But I must go."

Into his eyes came the gleam of distrust and jealousy. "Look at me," he ordered.

With some difficulty she forced her eyes to meet his.

"Have you got a lover?"

"No."

"Then where do you get the money we're living on?" He counted on her being too humiliated to answer in words. Instead of the hanging head and burning cheeks he saw clear, steady eyes, heard a calm, gentle and dignified voice say:

"In the streets."

His eyes dropped and a look of abject shame made his face pitiable. "Good Heavens," he muttered.

"How low we are!"

"We've been doing the best we could," said she simply.

"Isn't there any decency anywhere in you?" he flashed out, eagerly seizing the chance to forget his own shame in contemplating her greater degradation.

She looked out of the window. There was something terrible in the calmness of her profile. She finally said in an even, pensive voice:

"You have been intimate with a great many women, Rod. But you have never got acquainted with a single one."

He laughed good-humoredly. "Oh, yes, I have. I've learned that 'every woman is at heart a rake,' as Mr. Jingle Pope says."

She looked at him again, her face now curiously lighted by her slow faint smile. "Perhaps they showed you only what they thought you'd be able to appreciate," she suggested.

He took this as evidence of her being jealous of him. "Tell me, Susan, did you leave me--in Forty-fourth Street--because you thought or heard I wasn't true to you?"

"What did Drumley tell you?"

"I asked him, as you said in your note. He told me he knew no reason."

So Drumley had decided it was best Rod should not know why she left. Well, perhaps--probably--Drumley was right. But there was no reason why he shouldn't know the truth now. "I left," said she, "because I saw we were bad for each other."

This amused him. She saw that he did not believe. It wounded her, but she smiled carelessly. Her smile encouraged him to say: "I couldn't quite make up my mind whether the reason was jealousy or because you had the soul of a shameless woman. You see, I know human nature, and I know that a woman who once crosses the line never crosses back. I'll always have to watch you, my dear. But somehow I like it. I guess you have--you and I have--a rotten streak in us. We were brought up too strictly. That always makes one either too firm or too loose. I used to think I liked good women. But I don't. They bore me. That shows I'm rotten."

"Or that your idea of what's good is--is mistaken."

"You don't pretend that you haven't done wrong?" cried Rod.

"I might have done worse," replied she. "I might have wronged others. No, Rod, I can't honestly say I've ever felt wicked."

"Why, what brought you here?"

She reflected a moment, then smiled. "Two things brought me down," said she. "In the first place, I wasn't raised right. I was raised as a lady instead of as a human being. So I didn't know how to meet the conditions of life. In the second place--" her smile returned, broadened--"I was too--too what's called 'good.'"

"Pity about you!" mocked he.

"Being what's called good is all very well if you're independent or if you've got a husband or a father to do life's dirty work for you--or, perhaps, if you happen to be in some profession like preaching or teaching--though I don't believe the so-called 'goodness' would let you get very far even as a preacher. In most lines, to practice what we're taught as children would be to go to the bottom like a stone. You know this is a hard world, Rod. It's full of men and women fighting desperately for food and clothes and a roof to cover them--fighting each other. And to get on you've got to have the courage and the indifference to your fellow beings that'll enable you to do it."

"There's a lot of truth in that," admitted Spenser. "If I'd not been such a 'good fellow,' as they call it--a fellow everybody liked--if I'd been like Brent, for instance--Brent, who never would have any friends, who never would do anything for anybody but himself, who hadn't a thought except for his career--why, I'd be where he is."

It was at the tip of Susan's tongue to say, "Yes--strong--able to help others--able to do things worth while." But she did not speak.

Rod went on: "I'm not going to be a fool any longer. I'm going to be too busy to have friends or to help people or to do anything but push my own interests."

Susan, indifferent to being thus wholly misunderstood, was again moving toward the door. "I'll be back this evening, as usual," said she.

Spenser's face became hard and lowering: "You're going to stay here now, or you're not coming back," said he. "You can take your choice. Do you want me to know you've got the soul of a streetwalker?"

She stood at the foot of the bed, gazing at the wall above his head. "I must earn our expenses until we're safe," said she, once more telling a literal truth that was yet a complete deception.

"Why do you fret me?" exclaimed he. "Do you want me to be sick again?"

"Suppose you didn't get the advance right away," urged she.

"I tell you I shall get it! And I won't have you--do as you are doing. If you go, you go for keeps."

She seated herself. "Do you want me to read or take dictation?"

His face expressed the satisfaction small people find in small successes at asserting authority. "Don't be angry," said he. "I'm acting for your good. I'm saving you from yourself."

"I'm not angry," replied she, her strange eyes resting upon him.

He shifted uncomfortably. "Now what does that look mean?" he demanded with an uneasy laugh.

She smiled, shrugged her shoulders.

Sperry--small and thin, a weather-beaten, wooden face suggesting Mr. Punch, sly keen eyes, theater in every tone and gesture Sperry pushed the scenario hastily to completion and was so successful with Fitzalan that on Sunday afternoon he brought two hundred and fifty dollars, Spenser's half of the advance money.

"Didn't I tell you!" said Spenser to Susan, in triumph. "We'll move at once. Go pack your traps and put them in a carriage, and by the time you're back here Sperry and the nurses will have me ready."

It was about three when Susan got to her room. Clara heard her come in and soon appeared, bare feet in mules, hair hanging every which way. Despite the softening effect of the white nightdress and of the framing of abundant hair, her face was hard and coarse. She had been drunk on liquor and on opium the night before, and the effects were wearing off. As she was only twenty years old, the hard coarse look would withdraw before youth in a few hours; it was there only temporarily as a foreshadowing of what Clara would look like in five years or so.

"Hello, Lorna," said she. "Gee, what a bun my fellow and I had on last night! Did you hear us scrapping when we came in about five o'clock?"

"No," replied Susan. "I was up late and had a lot to do, and was kept at the hospital all day. I guess I must have fallen asleep."

"He gave me an awful beating," pursued Clara. "But I got one good crack at him with a bottle." She laughed. "I don't think he'll be doing much flirting till his cheek heals up. He looks a sight!" She opened her nightdress and showed Susan a deep blue-black mark on her left breast. "I wonder if I'll get cancer from that?" said she. "It'd be just my rotten luck. I've heard of several cases of it lately, and my father kicked my mother there, and she got cancer. Lord, how she did suffer!"

Susan shivered, turned her eyes away. Her blood surged with joy that she had once more climbed up out of this deep, dark wallow where the masses of her fellow beings weltered in darkness and drunkenness and disease--was up among the favored ones who, while they could not entirely escape the great ills of life, at least had the intelligence and the means to mitigate them. How fortunate that few of these unhappy ones had the imagination to realize their own wretchedness! "I don't care what becomes of me," Clara was saying. "What is there in it for me? I can have a good time only as long as my looks last--and that's true of every woman, ain't it? What's a woman but a body? Ain't I right?"

"That's why I'm going to stop being a woman as soon as ever I can," said Susan.

"Why, you're packing up!" cried Clara.

"Yes. My friend's well enough to be moved. We're going to live uptown."

"Right away?"

"This afternoon."

Clara dropped into a chair and began to weep. "I'll miss you something fierce!" sobbed she. "You're the only friend in the world I give a damn for, or that gives a damn for me. I wish to God I was like you. You don't need anybody."

"Oh, yes, I do, dear," cried Susan.

"But, I mean, you don't lean on anybody. I don't mean you're hard-hearted--for you ain't. You've pulled me and a dozen other girls out of the hole lots of times. But you're independent. Can't you take me along? I can drop that bum across the hall. I don't give a hoot for him. But a girl's got to make believe she cares for somebody or she'd blow her brains out."

"I can't take you along, but I'm going to come for you as soon as I'm on my feet," said Susan. "I've got to get up myself first. I've learned at least that much."

"Oh, you'll forget all about me."

"No," said Susan.

And Clara knew that she would not. Moaned Clara, "I'm not fit to go. I'm only a common streetwalker. You belong up there. You're going back to your own. But I belong here. I wish to God I was like most of the people down here, and didn't have any sense. No wonder you used to drink so! I'm getting that way, too. The only people that don't hit the booze hard down here are the muttonheads who don't know nothing and can't learn nothing. . . . I used to be contented. But somehow, being with you so much has made me dissatisfied."

"That means you're on your way up," said Susan, busy with her packing.

"It would, if I had sense enough. Oh, it's torment to have sense enough to see, and not sense enough to do!"

"I'll come for you soon," said Susan. "You're going up with me."

Clara watched her for some time in silence. "You're sure you're going to win?" said she, at last.

"Sure," replied Susan.

"Oh, you can't be as sure as that."

"Yes, but I can," laughed she. "I'm done with foolishness. I've made up my mind to get up in the world--with my self-respect if possible; if not, then without it. I'm going to have everything--money, comfort, luxury, pleasure. Everything!" And she dropped a folded skirt emphatically upon the pile she had been making, and gave a short, sharp nod. "I was taught a lot of things when I was little--things about being sweet and unselfish and all that. They'd be fine, if the world was Heaven. But it isn't."

"Not exactly," said Clara.

"Maybe they're fine, if you want to get to Heaven," continued Susan. "But I'm not trying to get to Heaven. I'm trying to live on earth. I don't like the game, and I don't like its rules. But--it's the only game, and I can't change the rules. 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.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

Chapter XIV

SPERRY had chosen for "Mr. and Mrs. Spenser" the second floor rear of a house on the south side of West Forty-fifth Street a few doors off Sixth Avenue. It was furnished as a sitting-room--elegant in red plush, with oil paintings on the walls, a fringed red silk-plush dado fastened to the mantelpiece with bright brass-headed tacks, elaborate imitation lace throws on the sofa and chairs, and an imposing piece that might have been a cabinet organ or a pianola or a roll-top desk but was in fact a comfortable folding bed. There was a marble stationary washstand behind the hand-embroidered screen in the corner, near one of the two windows. Through a deep clothes closet was a small but satisfactory bathroom.

"And it's warm in winter," said Mrs. Norris, the landlady, to Susan. "Don't you hate a cold bathroom?"

Susan declared that she did.

"There's only one thing I hate worse," said Mrs. Norris, "and that's cold coffee."

She had one of those large faces which look bald because the frame of hair does not begin until unusually far back. At fifty, when her hair would be thin, Mrs. Norris would be homely; but at thirty she was handsome in a bold, strong way. Her hair was always carefully done, her good figure beautifully corseted. It was said she was not married to Mr. Norris--because New York likes to believe that people are living together without being married, because Mr. Norris came and went irregularly, and because Mrs. Norris was so particular about her toilet--and everyone knows that when a woman has the man with whom she's satisfied securely fastened, she shows her content or her virtuous indifference to other men--or her laziness--by neglecting her hair and her hips and dressing in any old thing any which way. Whatever the truth as to Mrs. Norris's domestic life, she carried herself strictly and insisted upon keeping her house as respectable as can reasonably be expected in a large city. That is, everyone in it was quiet, was of steady and sedate habit, was backed by references. Not until Sperry had thoroughly qualified as a responsible person did Mrs. Norris accept his assurances as to the Spensers and consent to receive them. Downtown the apartment houses that admit persons of loose character are usually more expensive because that class of tenants have more and expect more than ordinary working people. Uptown the custom is the reverse; to get into a respectable house you must pay more. The Spensers had to pay fourteen a week for their quarters--and they were getting a real bargain, Mrs. Norris having a weakness for literature and art where they were respectable and paid regularly.

"What's left of the two hundred and fifty will not last long," said Spenser to Susan, when they were established and alone. "But we'll have another five hundred as soon as the play's done, and that'll be in less than a month. We're to begin tomorrow. In less than two months the play'll be on and the royalties will be coming in. I wonder how much I owe the doctor and the hospital."

"That's settled," said Susan.

He glanced at her with a frown. "How much was it? You had no right to pay!"

"You couldn't have got either doctor or room without payment in advance." She spoke tranquilly, with a quiet assurance of manner that was new in her, the nervous and sensitive about causing displeasure in others. She added, "Don't be cross, Rod. You know it's only pretense."

"Don't you believe anybody has any decency?" demanded he.

"It depends on what you mean by decency," replied she. "But why talk of the past? Let's forget it."

"I would that I could!" exclaimed he.

She laughed at his heroics. "Put that in your play," said she. "But this isn't the melodrama of the stage. It's the farce comedy of life."

"How you have changed! Has all the sweetness, all the womanliness, gone out of your character?"

She showed how little she was impressed. "I've learned to take terrible things--really terrible things--without making a fuss--or feeling like making a fuss. You can't expect me to get excited over mere staginess. They're fond of fake emotions up in this part of town. But down where I've been so long the real horrors come too thick and fast for there to be any time to fake."

He continued to frown, presently came out of a deep study to say, "Susie, I see I've got to have a serious talk with you."

"Wait till you're well, my dear," said she. "I'm afraid I'll not be very sympathetic with your seriousness."

"No--today. I'm not an invalid. And our relations worry me, whenever I think of them."

He observed her as she sat with hands loosely clasped in her lap; there was an inscrutable look upon her delicate face, upon the clear-cut features so attractively framed by her thick dark hair, brown in some lights, black in others.

"Well?" said she.

"To begin, I want you to stop rouging your lips. It's the only sign of--of what you were. I'd a little rather you didn't smoke. But as respectable women smoke nowadays, why I don't seriously object. And when you get more clothes, get quieter ones. Not that you dress loudly or in bad taste----"

"Thank you," murmured Susan.

"What did you say?"

"I didn't mean to interrupt. Go on."

"I admire the way you dress, but it makes me jealous. I want you to have nice clothes for the house. I like things that show your neck and suggest your form. But I don't want you attracting men's eyes and their loose thoughts, in the street. . . . And I don't want you to look so damnably alluring about the feet. That's your best trick--and your worst. Why are you smiling--in that fashion?"

"You talk to me as if I were your wife."

He gazed at her with an expression that was as affectionate as it was generous--and it was most generous. "Well, you may be some day--if you keep straight. And I think you will."

The artificial red of her lips greatly helped to make her sweetly smiling face the perfection of gentle irony. "And you?" said she.

"You know perfectly well it's different about a man."

"I know nothing of the sort," replied she. "Among certain kinds of people that is the rule. But I'm not of those kinds. I'm trying to make my way in the world, exactly like a man. So I've got to be free from the rules that may be all very well for ladies. A woman can't fight with her hands tied, any more than a man can--and you know what happens to the men who allow themselves to be tied; they're poor downtrodden creatures working hard at small pay for the men who fight with their hands free."

"I've taken you out of the unprotected woman class, my dear," he reminded her. "You're mine, now, and you're going back where you belong."

"Back to the cage it's taken me so long to learn to do without?" She shook her head. "No, Rod--I couldn't possibly do it--not if I wanted to. . . . You've got several false ideas about me. You'll have to get rid of them, if we're to get along."

"For instance?"

"In the first place, don't delude yourself with the notion that I'd marry you. I don't know whether the man I was forced to marry is dead or whether he's got a divorce. I don't care. No matter how free I was I shouldn't marry you."

He smiled complacently. She noted it without irritation. Truly, small indeed is the heat of any kind that can be got from the warmed-up ashes of a burnt-out passion. She went easily on:

"You have nothing to offer me--neither love nor money. And a woman--unless she's a poor excuse--insists on one or the other. You and I fancied we loved each other for a while. We don't fool ourselves in that way now. At least I don't, though I believe you do imagine I'm in love with you."

"You wouldn't be here if you weren't."

"Put that out of your head, Rod. It'll only breed trouble. I don't like to say these things to you, but you compel me to. I learned long ago how foolish it is to put off unpleasant things that will have to be faced in the end. The longer they're put off the worse the final reckoning is. Most of my troubles have come through my being too weak or good-natured--or whatever it was--to act as my good sense told me. I'm not going to make that mistake any more. And I'm going to start the new deal with absolute frankness with you. I am not in love with you."

"I know you better than you know yourself," said he.

"For a little while after I found you again I did have a return of the old feeling--or something like it. But it soon passed. I couldn't love you. I know you too well."

He struggled hard with his temper, as his vanity lashed at it. She saw, struggled with her old sensitiveness about inflicting even necessary pain upon others, went on:

"I simply like you, Rod--and that's all. We're well acquainted. You're physically attractive to me--not wildly so, but enough--more than any other man--probably more than most husbands are to their wives--or most wives to their husbands. So as long as you treat me well and don't wander off to other women, I'm more than willing to stay on here."

"Really!" said he, in an intensely sarcastic tone. "Really!"

"Now--keep your temper," she warned. "Didn't I keep mine when you were handing me that impertinent talk about how I should dress and the rest of it? No--let me finish. In the second place and in conclusion, my dear Rod, I'm not going to live off you. I'll pay my half of the room. I'll pay for my own clothes--and rouge for my lips. I'll buy and cook what we eat in the room; you'll pay when we go to a restaurant. I believe that's all."

"Are you quite sure?" inquired he with much satire.

"Yes, I think so. Except--if you don't like my terms, I'm ready to leave at once."

"And go back to the streets, I suppose?" jeered he.

"If it were necessary--yes. So long as I've got my youth and my health, I'll do precisely as I please. I've no craving for respectability--not the slightest. I--I----" She tried to speak of her birth, that secret shame of which she was ashamed. She had been thinking that Brent's big fine way of looking at things had cured her of this bitterness. She found that it had not--as yet. So she went on, "I'd prefer your friendship to your ill will--much prefer it, as you're the only person I can look to for what a man can do for a woman, and as I like you. But if I have to take tyranny along with the friendship--" she looked at him quietly and her tones were almost tender, almost appealing--"then, it's good-by, Rod."

She had silenced him, for he saw in her eyes, much more gray than violet though the suggestion of violet was there, that she meant precisely what she said. He was astonished, almost dazed by the change in her. This woman grown was not the Susie who had left him. No--and yet----

She had left him, hadn't she? That showed a character completely hidden from him, perhaps the character he was now seeing. He asked--and there was no sarcasm and a great deal of uneasiness in his tone:

"How do you expect to make a living?"

"I've got a place at forty dollars a week."

"Forty dollars a week! You!" He scowled savagely at her. "There's only one thing anyone would pay you forty a week for."

"That's what I'd have said," rejoined she. "But it seems not to be true. My luck may not last, but while it lasts, I'll have forty a week."

"I don't believe you," said he, with the angry bluntness of jealousy.

"Then you want me to go?" inquired she, with a certain melancholy but without any weakness.

He ignored her question. He demanded:

"Who's giving it to you?"

"Brent."

Spenser leaned from the bed toward her in his excitement. "Robert Brent?" he cried.

"Yes. I'm to have a part in one of his plays."

Spenser laughed harshly. "What rot! You're his mistress."

"It wouldn't be strange for you to think I'd accept that position for so little, but you must know a man of his sort wouldn't have so cheap a mistress."

"It's simply absurd."

"He is to train me himself."

"You never told me you knew him."

"I don't."

"Who got you the job?"

"He saw me in Fitzalan's office the day you sent me there. He asked me to call, and when I went he made me the offer."

"Absolute rot. What reason did he give?"

"He said I looked as if I had the temperament he was in search of."

"You must take me for a fool."

"Why should I lie to you?"

"God knows. Why do women lie to men all the time? For the pleasure of fooling them."

"Oh, no. To get money, Rod--the best reason in the world, it being rather hard for a woman to make money by working for it."

"The man's in love with you!"

"I wish he were," said Susan, laughing. "I'd not be here, my dear--you may be sure of that. And I'd not content myself with forty a week. Oh, you don't know what tastes I've got! Wait till I turn myself loose."

"Well--you can--in a few months," said Spenser.

Even as he had been protesting his disbelief in her story, his manner toward her had been growing more respectful--a change that at once hurt and amused her with its cynical suggestions, and also pleased her, giving her a confidence-breeding sense of a new value in herself. Rod went on, with a kind of shamefaced mingling of jest and earnest:

"You stick by me, Susie, old girl, and the time'll come when I'll be able to give you more than Brent."

"I hope so," said Susan.

He eyed her sharply. "I feel like a fool believing such a fairy story as you've been telling me. Yet I do."

"That's good," laughed she. "Now I can stay. If you hadn't believed me, I'd have had to go. And I don't want to do that--not yet."

His eyes flinched. "Not yet? What does that mean?"

"It means I'm content to stay, at present. Who can answer for tomorrow?" Her eyes lit up mockingly. "For instance--you. Today you think you're going to be true to me don't you? Yet tomorrow--or as soon as you get strength and street clothes, I may catch you in some restaurant telling some girl she's the one you've been getting ready for."

He laughed, but not heartily. Sperry came, and Susan went to buy at a department store a complete outfit for Rod, who still had only nightshirts. As she had often bought for him in the old days, she felt she would have no difficulty in fitting him nearly enough, with her accurate eye supplementing the measurements she had taken. When she got back home two hours and a half later, bringing her purchases in a cab, Sperry had gone and Rod was asleep. She sat in the bathroom, with the gas lighted, and worked at "Cavalleria" until she heard him calling. He had awakened in high good-humor.

"That was an awful raking you gave me before Sperry came," began he. "But it did me good. A man gets so in the habit of ordering women about that it becomes second nature to him. You've made it clear to me that I've even less control over you than you have over me. So, dear, I'm going to be humble and try to give satisfaction, as servants say."

"You'd better," laughed Susan. "At least, until you get on your feet again."

"You say we don't love each other," Rod went on, a becoming brightness in his strong face. "Well--maybe so. But--we suit each other--don't we?"

"That's why I want to stay," said Susan, sitting on the bed and laying her hand caressingly upon his. "I could stand it to go, for I've been trained to stand anything--everything. But I'd hate it."

He put his arm round her, drew her against his breast. "Aren't you happy here?" he murmured.

"Happier than any place else in the world," replied she softly.

After a while she got a small dinner for their two selves on the gas stove she had brought with her and had set up in the bathroom. As they ate, she cross-legged on the bed opposite him, they beamed contentedly at each other. "Do you remember the dinner we had at the St. Nicholas in Cincinnati?" asked she.

"It wasn't as good as this," declared he. "Not nearly so well cooked. You could make a fortune as a cook. But then you do everything well."

"Even to rouging my lips?"

"Oh, forget it!" laughed he. "I'm an ass. There's a wonderful fascination in the contrast between the dash of scarlet and the pallor of that clear, lovely skin of yours."

Her eyes danced. "You are getting well!" she exclaimed. "I'm sorry I bought you clothes. I'll be uneasy every time you're out."

"You can trust me. I see I've got to hustle to keep my job with you. Well, thank God, your friend Brent's old enough to be your father."

"Is he?" cried Susan. "Do you know, I never thought of his age."

"Yes, he's forty at least--more. Are you sure he isn't after you, Susie?"

"He warned me that if I annoyed him in that way he'd discharge me."

"Do you like him?"

"I--don't--know" was Susan's slow, reflective answer. "I'm--afraid of him--a little."

Both became silent. Finally Rod said, with an impatient shake of the head, "Let's not think of him."

"Let's try on your new clothes," cried Susan.

And when the dishes were cleared away they had a grand time trying on the things she had bought. It was amazing how near she had come to fitting him. "You ought to feel flattered," said she. "Only a labor of love could have turned out so well."

He turned abruptly from admiring his new suit in the glass and caught her in his arms. "You do love me--you do!" he cried. "No woman would have done all you've done for me, if she didn't."

For answer, Susan kissed him passionately; and as her body trembled with the sudden upheaval of emotions long dormant or indulged only in debased, hateful ways, she burst into tears. She knew, even in that moment of passion, that she did not love him; but not love itself can move the heart more deeply than gratitude and her bruised heart was so grateful for his words and tones and gestures of affection!

Wednesday afternoon, on the way to Brent's house, she glanced up at the clock in the corner tower of the Grand Central Station. It lacked five minutes of three. She walked slowly, timed herself so accurately that, as the butler opened the door, a cathedral chime hidden somewhere in the upper interior boomed the hour musically. The man took her direct to the elevator, and when it stopped at the top floor, Brent himself opened the door, as before. He was dismissing a short fat man whom Susan placed as a manager, and a tall, slim, and most fashionably dressed woman with a beautiful insincere face--anyone would have at once declared her an actress, probably a star. The woman gave Susan a searching, feminine look which changed swiftly to superciliousness. Both the man and the woman were loath to go, evidently had not finished what they had come to say. But Brent, in his abrupt but courteous way, said:

"Tomorrow at four, then. As you see, my next appointment has begun." And he had them in the elevator with the door closed. He turned upon Susan the gaze that seemed to take in everything. "You are in better spirits, I see," said he.

"I'm sorry to have interrupted," said she. "I could have waited."

"But I couldn't," replied he. "Some day you'll discover that your time is valuable, and that to waste it is far sillier than if you were to walk along throwing your money into the gutter. Time ought to be used like money--spent generously but intelligently." He talked rapidly on, with his manner as full of unexpressed and inexpressible intensity as the voice of the violin, with his frank egotism that had no suggestion of vanity or conceit. "Because I systematize my time, I'm never in a hurry, never at a loss for time to give to whatever I wish. I didn't refuse to keep you waiting for your sake but for my own. Now the next hour belongs to you and me--and we'll forget about time--as, if we were dining in a restaurant, we'd not think of the bill till it was presented. What did you do with the play?"

Susan could only look at him helplessly.

He laughed, handed her a cigarette, rose to light a match for her. "Settle yourself comfortably," said he, "and say what's in your head."

With hands deep in the trousers of his house suit, he paced up and down the long room, the cigarette loose between his lips. Whenever she saw his front face she was reassured; but whenever she saw his profile, her nerves trembled--for in the profile there was an expression of almost ferocious resolution, of tragic sadness, of the sternness that spares not. The full face was kind, if keen; was sympathetic--was the man as nature had made him. The profile was the great man--the man his career had made. And Susan knew that the profile was master.

"Which part did you like Santuzza or Lola?"

"Lola," replied she.

He paused, looked at her quickly. Why?"

"Oh, I don't sympathize with the woman--or the man--who's deserted. I pity, but I can't help seeing it's her or his own fault. Lola explains why. Wouldn't you rather laugh than cry? Santuzza may have been attractive in the moments of passion, but how she must have bored Turiddu the rest of the time! She was so intense, so serious--so vain and selfish."

"Vain and selfish? That's interesting." He walked up and down several times, then turned on her abruptly. "Well--go on," he said. "I'm waiting to hear why she was vain and selfish."

"Isn't it vain for a woman to think a man ought to be crazy about her all the time because he once has been? Isn't it selfish for her to want him to be true to her because it gives her pleasure, even though she knows it doesn't give him pleasure?"

"Men and women are all vain and selfish in love," said he.

"But the women are meaner than the men," replied she, "because they're more ignorant and narrow-minded."

He was regarding her with an expression that made her uneasy. "But that isn't in the play--none of it," said he.

"Well, it ought to be," replied she. "Santuzza is the old-fashioned conventional heroine. I used to like them--until I had lived a little, myself. She isn't true to life. But in Lola----"

"Yes--what about Lola?" he demanded.

"Oh, she wasn't a heroine, either. She was just human--taking happiness when it offered. And her gayety--and her capriciousness. A man will always break away from a solemn, intense woman to get that sort of sunshine."

"Yes--yes--go on," said Brent.

"And her sour, serious, solemn husband explains why wives are untrue to their husbands. At least, it seems so to me."

He was walking up and down again. Every trace of indolence, of relaxation, was gone from his gait and from his features. His mind was evidently working like an engine at full speed. Suddenly he halted. "You've given me a big idea," said he. "I'll throw away the play I was working on. I'll do your play."

Susan laughed--pleased, yet a little afraid he was kinder than she deserved. "What I said was only common sense--what my experience has taught me."

"That's all that genius is, my dear," replied he. "As soon as we're born, our eyes are operated on so that we shall never see anything as it is. The geniuses are those who either escape the operation or are reëndowed with true sight by experience." He nodded approvingly at her. "You're going to be a person--or, rather, you're going to show you're a person. But that comes later. You thought of Lola as your part?"

"I tried to. But I don't know anything about acting except what I've seen and the talk I've heard."

"As I said the other day, that means you've little to learn. Now--as to Lola's entrance."

"Oh, I thought of a lot of things to do--to show that she, too, loved Turiddu and that she had as much right to love--and to be loved--as Santuzza had. Santuzza had had her chance, and had failed."

Brent was highly amused. "You seem to forget that Lola was a married woman--and that if Santuzza didn't get a husband she'd be the mother of a fatherless child."

Never had he seen in her face such a charm of sweet melancholy as at that moment. "I suppose the way I was born and the life I've led make me think less of those things than most people do," replied she. "I was talking about natural hearts--what people think inside--the way they act when they have courage."

"When they have courage," Brent repeated reflectively. "But who has courage?"

"A great many people are compelled to have it," said she.

"I never had it until I got enough money to be independent."

"I never had it," said Susan, "until I had no money."

He leaned against the big table, folded his arms on his chest, looked at her with eyes that made her feel absolutely at ease with him. Said he:

"You have known what it was to have no money--none?"

Susan nodded. "And no friends--no place to sleep--worse off than Robinson Crusoe when the waves threw him on the island. I had to--to suck my own blood to keep alive."

"You smile as you say that," said he.

"If I hadn't learned to smile over such things," she answered, "I'd have been dead long ago."

He seated himself opposite her. He asked:

"Why didn't you kill yourself?"

"I was afraid."

"Of the hereafter?"

"Oh no. Of missing the coming true of my dreams about life."

"Love?"

"That--and more. Just love wouldn't satisfy me. I want to see the world--to know the world--and to be somebody. I want to try everything."

She laughed gayly--a sudden fascinating vanishing of the melancholy of eyes and mouth, a sudden flashing out of young beauty. "I've been down about as deep as one can go. I want to explore in the other direction."

"Yes--yes," said Brent, absently. "You must see it all."

He remained for some time in a profound reverie, she as unconscious of the passing of time as he for if he had his thoughts, she had his face to study. Try as she would, she could not associate the idea of age with him--any age. He seemed simply a grown man. And the more closely she studied him the greater her awe became. He knew so much; he understood so well. She could not imagine him swept away by any of the petty emotions--the vanities, the jealousies, the small rages, the small passions and loves that made up the petty days of the small creatures who inhabit the world and call it theirs. Could he fall in love? Had he been in love? Yes--he must have been in love many times--for many women must have taken trouble to please a man so well worth while, and he must have passed from one woman to another as his whims or his tastes changed. Could he ever care about her--as a woman? Did he think her worn out as a physical woman? Or would he realize that body is nothing by itself; that unless the soul enters it, it is cold and meaningless and worthless--like the electric bulb when the filament is dark and the beautiful, hot, brilliant and intensely living current is not in it? Could she love him? Could she ever feel equal and at ease, through and through, with a man so superior?

"You'd better study the part of Lola--learn the lines," said he, when he had finished his reflecting. "Then--this day week at the same hour--we will begin. We will work all afternoon--we will dine together--go to some theater where I can illustrate what I mean. Beginning with next Wednesday that will be the program every day until further notice."

"Until you see whether you can do anything with me or not?"

"Just so. You are living with Spenser?"

"Yes." Susan could have wished his tone less matter-of-fact.

"How is he getting on?"

"He and Sperry are doing a play for Fitzalan."

"Really? That's good. He has talent. If he'll learn of Sperry and talk less and work more, and steadily, he'll make a lot of money. You are not tied to him in any way?"

"No--not now that he's prospering. Except, of course, that I'm fond of him."

He shrugged his shoulders. "Oh, everybody must have somebody. You've not seen this house. I'll show it to you, as we've still fifteen minutes."

A luxurious house it was--filled with things curious and, some of them, beautiful--things gathered in excursions through Europe, Susan assumed. The only absolutely simple room was his bedroom, big and bare and so arranged that he could sleep practically out of doors. She saw servants--two men besides the butler, several women. But the house was a bachelor's house, with not a trace of feminine influence. And evidently he cared nothing about it but lived entirely in that wonderful world which so awed Susan--the world he had created within himself, the world of which she had alluring glimpses through his eyes, through his tones and gestures even. Small people strive to make, and do make, impression of themselves by laboring to show what they know and think. But the person of the larger kind makes no such effort. In everything Brent said and did and wore, in all his movements, gestures, expressions, there was the unmistakable hallmark of the man worth while. The social life has banished simplicity from even the most savage tribe. Indeed, savages, filled with superstitions, their every movement the result of some notion of proper ceremonial, are the most complex of all the human kind. The effort toward simplicity is not a movement back to nature, for there savage and lower animal are completely enslaved by custom and instinct; it is a movement upward toward the freedom of thought and action of which our best intelligence has given us a conception and for which it has given us a longing. Never had Susan met so simple a man; and never had she seen one so far from all the silly ostentations of rudeness, of unattractive dress, of eccentric or coarse speech wherewith the cheap sort of man strives to proclaim himself individual and free.

With her instinct for recognizing the best at first sight, Susan at once understood. And she was like one who has been stumbling about searching for the right road, and has it suddenly shown to him. She fairly darted along this right road. She was immediately busy, noting the mistakes in her own ideas of manners and dress, of good and bad taste. She realized how much she had to learn. But this did not discourage her. For she realized at the same time that she could learn--and his obvious belief in her as a possibility was most encouraging.

When he bade her good-by at the front door and it closed behind her, she was all at once so tired that it seemed to her she would then and there sink down through sheer fatigue and fall asleep. For no physical exercise so quickly and utterly exhausts as real brain exercise--thinking, studying, learning with all the concentrated intensity of a thoroughbred in the last quarter of the mile race.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

Chapter XV

SPENSER had time and thought for his play only. He no longer tormented himself with jealousy of the abilities and income and fame of Brent and the other successful writers for the stage; was not he about to equal them, probably to surpass them? As a rule, none of the mean emotions is able to thrive--unless it has the noxious vapors from disappointment and failure to feed upon. Spenser, in spirits and in hope again, was content with himself. Jealousy of Brent about Susan had been born of dissatisfaction with himself as a failure and envy of Brent as a success; it died with that dissatisfaction and that envy. His vanity assured him that while there might be possibly--ways in which he was not without rivals, certainly where women were concerned he simply could not be equaled; the woman he wanted he could have--and he could hold her as long as he wished. The idea that Susan would give a sentimental thought to a man "old enough to be her father"--Brent was forty-one--was too preposterous to present itself to his mind. She loved the handsome, fascinating, youthful Roderick Spenser; she would soon be crazy about him.

Rarely does it occur to a man to wonder what a woman is thinking. During courtship very young men attribute intellect and qualities of mystery and awe to the woman they love. But after men get an insight into the mind of woman and discover how trivial are the matters that of necessity usually engage it, they become skeptical about feminine mentality; they would as soon think of speculating on what profundities fill the brain of the kitten playing with a ball as of seeking a solution of the mystery behind a woman's fits of abstraction. However, there was in Susan's face, especially in her eyes, an expression so unusual, so arresting that Spenser, self-centered and convinced of woman's intellectual deficiency though he was, did sometimes inquire what she was thinking about. He asked this question at breakfast the morning after that second visit to Brent.

"Was I thinking?" she countered.

"You certainly were not listening. You haven't a notion what I was talking about."

"About your play."

"Of course. You know I talk nothing else," laughed he. "I must bore you horribly."

"No, indeed," protested she.

"No, I suppose not. You're not bored because you don't listen."

He was cheerful about it. He talked merely to arrange his thoughts, not because he expected Susan to understand matters far above one whom nature had fashioned and experience had trained to minister satisfyingly to the physical and sentimental needs of man. He assumed that she was as worshipful before his intellect as in the old days. He would have been even more amazed than enraged had he known that she regarded his play as mediocre claptrap, false to life, fit only for the unthinking, sloppily sentimental crowd that could not see the truth about even their own lives, their own thoughts and actions.

"There you go again!" cried he, a few minutes later. "What are you thinking about? I forgot to ask how you got on with Brent. Poor chap--he's had several failures in the past year. He must be horribly cut up. They say he's written out. What does he think he's trying to get at with you?"

"Acting, as I told you," replied Susan. She felt ashamed for him, making this pitiable exhibition of patronizing a great man.

"Sperry tells me he has had that twist in his brain for a long time--that he has tried out a dozen girls or more--drops them after a few weeks or months. He has a regular system about it--runs away abroad, stops the pay after a month or so."

"Well, the forty a week's clear gain while it lasts," said Susan. She tried to speak lightly. But she felt hurt and uncomfortable. There had crept into her mind one of those disagreeable ideas that skurry into some dusky corner to hide, and reappear from time to time making every fit of the blues so much the sadder and aggravating despondency toward despair.

"Oh, I didn't mean to suggest that you wouldn't succeed," Spenser hastened to apologize with more or less real kindliness. "Sperry says Brent has some good ideas about acting. So, you'll learn something--maybe enough to enable me to put you in a good position--if Brent gets tired and if you still want to be independent, as you call it."

"I hope so," said Susan absently.

Spenser was no more absorbed in his career than she in hers; only, she realized how useless it would be to try to talk it to him--that he would not give her so much as ears in an attitude of polite attention. If he could have looked into her head that morning and seen what thoughts were distracting her from hearing about the great play, he would have been more amused and disgusted than ever with feminine frivolity of mind and incapacity in serious matters. For, it so happened that at the moment Susan was concentrating on a new dress. He would have laughed in the face of anyone saying to him that this new dress was for Susan in the pursuit of her scheme of life quite as weighty a matter, quite as worthy of the most careful attention, as was his play for him. Yet that would have been the literal truth. Primarily man's appeal is to the ear, woman's to the eye--the reason, by the way, why the theater--preeminently the place to see--tends to be dominated by woman.

Susan had made up her mind not only that she would rapidly improve herself in every way, but also how she would go about the improving. She saw that, for a woman at least, dress is as much the prime essential as an arresting show window for a dealer in articles that display well. She knew she was far from the goal of which she dreamed--the position where she would no longer be a woman primarily but a personage. Dress would not merely increase her physical attractiveness; it would achieve the far more important end of gaining her a large measure of consideration. She felt that Brent, even Brent, dealer in actualities and not to be fooled by pretenses, would in spite of himself change his opinion of her if she went to him dressed less like a middle class working girl, more like the woman of the upper classes. At best, using all the advantages she had, she felt there was small enough chance of her holding his interest; for she could not make herself believe that he was not deceiving himself about her. However, to strengthen herself in every way with him was obviously the wisest effort she could make. So, she must have a new dress for the next meeting, one which would make him better pleased to take her out to dinner. True, if she came in rags, he would not be disturbed--for he had nothing of the snob in him. But at the same time, if she came dressed like a woman of his own class, he would be impressed. "He's a man, if he is a genius," reasoned she.

Vital though the matter was, she calculated that she did not dare spend more than twenty-five dollars on this toilet. She must put by some of her forty a week; Brent might give her up at any time, and she must not be in the position of having to choose immediately between submitting to the slavery of the kept woman as Spenser's dependent and submitting to the costly and dangerous and repulsive freedom of the woman of the streets. Thus, to lay out twenty-five dollars on a single costume was a wild extravagance. She thought it over from every point of view; she decided that she must take the risk.

Late in the afternoon she walked for an hour in Fifth Avenue. After some hesitation she ventured into the waiting- and dressing-rooms of several fashionable hotels. She was in search of ideas for the dress, which must be in the prevailing fashion. She had far too good sense and good taste to attempt to be wholly original in dress; she knew that the woman who understands her business does not try to create a fashion but uses the changing and capricious fashion as the means to express a constant and consistent style of her own. She appreciated her limitations in such matters--how far she as yet was from the knowledge necessary to forming a permanent and self-expressive style. She was prepared to be most cautious in giving play to an individual taste so imperfectly educated as hers had necessarily been.

She felt that she had the natural instinct for the best and could recognize it on sight--an instinct without which no one can go a step forward in any of the arts. She had long since learned to discriminate among the vast masses of offering, most of them tasteless or commonplace, to select the rare and few things that have merit. Thus, she had always stood out in the tawdrily or drearily or fussily dressed throngs, had been a pleasure to the eyes even of those who did not know why they were pleased. On that momentous day, she finally saw a woman dressed in admirable taste who was wearing a costume simple enough for her to venture to think of copying the main points. She walked several blocks a few yards behind this woman, then hurried ahead of her, turned and walked toward her to inspect the front of the dress. She repeated this several times between the St. Regis and Sherry's. The woman soon realized, as women always do, what the girl in the shirtwaist and short skirt was about. But she happened to be a good-natured person, and smiled pleasantly at Susan, and got in return a smile she probably did not soon forget.

The next morning Susan went shopping. She had it in mind to get the materials for a costume of a certain delicate shade of violet. A dress of that shade, and a big hat trimmed in tulle to match or to harmonize, with a bunch of silk violets fastened in the tulle in a certain way.

Susan knew she had good looks, knew what was becoming to her darkly and softly fringed violet eyes, pallid skin, to her rather tall figure, slender, not voluptuous yet suggesting voluptuousness. She could see herself in that violet costume. But when she began to look at materials she hesitated. The violet would be beautiful; but it was not a wise investment for a girl with few clothes, with but one best dress. She did not give it up definitely, however, until she came upon a sixteen-yard remnant of soft gray China crêpe. Gray was a really serviceable color for the best dress of a girl of small means. And this remnant, certainly enough for a dress, could be had for ten dollars, where violet China crêpe of the shade she wanted would cost her a dollar a yard. She took the remnant.

She went to the millinery department and bought a large hat frame. It was of a good shape and she saw how it could be bent to suit her face. She paid fifty cents for this, and two dollars and seventy cents for four yards of gray tulle. She found that silk flowers were beyond her means; so she took a bunch of presentable looking violets of the cheaper kind at two dollars and a half. She happened to pass a counter whereon were displayed bargains in big buckles and similar odds and ends of steel and enamel. She fairly pounced upon a handsome gray buckle with violet enamel, which cost but eighty-nine cents. For a pair of gray suede ties she paid two dollars; for a pair of gray silk stockings, ninety cents. These matters, with some gray silk net for the collar, gray silk for a belt, linings and the like, made her total bill twenty-three dollars and sixty-seven cents. She returned home content and studied "Cavalleria" until her purchases arrived.

Spenser was out now, was working all day and in the evenings at Sperry's office high up in the Times Building. So, Susan had freedom for her dressmaking operations. To get them off her mind that she might work uninterruptedly at learning Lola's part in "Cavalleria," she toiled all Saturday, far into Sunday morning, was astir before Spenser waked, finished the dress soon after breakfast and the hat by the middle of the afternoon. When Spenser returned from Sperry's office to take her to dinner, she was arrayed. For the first time he saw her in fashionable attire and it was really fashionable, for despite all her disadvantages she, who had real and rare capacity for learning, had educated herself well in the chief business of woman the man-catcher in her years in New York.

He stood rooted to the threshold. It would have justified a vanity less vigorous than Susan or any other normal human being possessed, to excite such a look as was in his eyes. He drew a long breath by way of breaking the spell over speech.

"You are beautiful!" he exclaimed.

And his eyes traveled from the bewitching hat, set upon her head coquettishly yet without audacity, to the soft crêpe dress, its round collar showing her perfect throat, its graceful lines subtly revealing her alluring figure, to the feet that men always admired, whatever else of beauty or charm they might fail to realize.

"How you have grown!" he ejaculated. Then, "How did you do it?"

"By all but breaking myself."

"It's worth whatever it cost. If I had a dress suit, we'd go to Sherry's or the Waldorf. I'm willing to go, without the dress suit."

"No. I've got everything ready for dinner at home."

"Then, why on earth did you dress? To give me a treat?"

"Oh, I hate to go out in a dress I've never worn. And a woman has to wear a hat a good many times before she knows how."

"What a lot of fuss you women do make about clothes." "You seem to like it, all the same."

"Of course. But it's a trifle."

"It has got many women a good provider for life. And not paying attention to dress or not knowing how has made most of the old maids. Are those things trifles?"

Spenser laughed and shifted his ground without any sense of having been pressed to do so. "Men are fools where women are concerned."

"Or women are wise where men are concerned."

"I guess they do know their business--some of them," he confessed. "Still, it's a silly business, you must admit."

"Nothing is silly that's successful," said Susan.

"Depends on what you mean by success," argued he.

"Success is getting what you want."

"Provided one wants what's worth while," said he.

"And what's worth while?" rejoined she. "Why, whatever one happens to want."

To avoid any possible mischance to the grande toilette he served the dinner and did the dangerous part of the clearing up. They went to the theater, Rod enjoying even more than she the very considerable admiration she got. When she was putting the dress away carefully that night, Rod inquired when he was to be treated again.

"Oh--I don't know," replied she. "Not soon."

She was too wise to tell him that the dress would not be worn again until Brent was to see it. The hat she took out of the closet from time to time and experimented with it, reshaping the brim, studying the different effects of different angles. It delighted Spenser to catch her at this "foolishness"; he felt so superior, and with his incurable delusion of the shallow that dress is an end, not merely a means, he felt more confident than ever of being able to hold her when he should have the money to buy her what her frivolous and feminine nature evidently craved beyond all else in the world. But----

When he bought a ready-to-wear evening suit, he made more stir about it than had Susan about her costume--this, when dress to him was altogether an end in itself and not a shrewd and useful means. He spent more time in admiring himself in it before the mirror, and looked at it, and at himself in it, with far more admiration and no criticism at all. Susan noted this--and after the manner of women who are wise or indifferent--or both--she made no comment.

At the studio floor of Brent's house the door of the elevator was opened for Susan by a small young man with a notably large head, bald and bulging. His big smooth face had the expression of extreme amiability that usually goes with weakness and timidity. "I am Mr. Brent's secretary, Mr. Garvey," he explained. And Susan--made as accurate as quick in her judgments of character by the opportunities and the necessities of her experience--saw that she had before her one of those nice feeble folk who either get the shelter of some strong personality as a bird hides from the storm in the thick branches of a great tree or are tossed and torn and ruined by life and exist miserably until rescued by death. She knew the type well; it had been the dominant type in her surroundings ever since she left Sutherland. Indeed, is it not the dominant type in the whole ill-equipped, sore-tried human race? And does it not usually fail of recognition because so many of us who are in fact weak, look--and feel--strong because we are sheltered by inherited money or by powerful friends or relatives or by chance lodgment in a nook unvisited of the high winds of life in the open? Susan liked Garvey at once; they exchanged smiles and were friends.

She glanced round the room. At the huge open window Brent, his back to her, was talking earnestly to a big hatchet-faced man with a black beard. Even as Susan glanced Brent closed the interview; with an emphatic gesture of fist into palm he exclaimed, "And that's final. Good-by." The two men came toward her, both bowed, the hatchet-faced man entered the elevator and was gone. Brent extended his hand with a smile.

"You evidently didn't come to work today," said he with a careless, fleeting glance at the grande toilette. "But we are prepared against such tricks. Garvey, take her down to the rear dressing-room and have the maid lay her out a simple costume." To Susan, "Be as quick as you can." And he seated himself at his desk and was reading and signing letters.

Susan, crestfallen, followed Garvey down the stairway. She had confidently expected that he would show some appreciation of her toilette. She knew she had never in her life looked so well. In the long glass in the dressing-room, while Garvey was gone to send the maid, she inspected herself again. Yes--never anything like so well. And Brent had noted her appearance only to condemn it. She was always telling herself that she wished him to regard her as a working woman, a pupil in stagecraft. But now that she had proof that he did so regard her, she was depressed, resentful. However, this did not last long. While she was changing to linen skirt and shirtwaist, she began to laugh at herself. How absurd she had been, thinking to impress this man who had known so many beautiful women, who must have been satiated long ago with beauty--she thinking to create a sensation in such a man, with a simple little costume of her own crude devising. She reappeared in the studio, laughter in her eyes and upon her lips. Brent apparently did not glance at her; yet he said, "What's amusing you?"

She confessed all, on one of her frequent impulses to candor--those impulses characteristic both of weak natures unable to exercise self-restraint and of strong natures, indifferent to petty criticism and misunderstanding, and absent from vain mediocrity, which always has itself--that is, appearances--on its mind. She described in amusing detail how she had planned and got together the costume how foolish his reception of it had made her feel. "I've no doubt you guessed what was in my head," concluded she. "You see everything."

"I did notice that you were looking unusually well, and that you felt considerably set up over it," said he. "But why not? Vanity's an excellent thing. Like everything else it's got to be used, not misused. It can help us to learn instead of preventing."

"I had an excuse for dressing up," she reminded him. "You said we were to dine together. I thought you wouldn't want there to be too much contrast between us. Next time I'll be more sensible."

"Dress as you like for the present," said he. "You can always change here. Later on dress will be one of the main things, of course. But not now. Have you learned the part?"

And they began. She saw at the far end of the room a platform about the height of a stage. He explained that Garvey, with the book of the play, would take the other parts in Lola's scenes, and sent them both to the stage. "Don't be nervous," Garvey said to her in an undertone. "He doesn't expect anything of you. This is simply to get started." But she could not suppress the trembling in her legs and arms, the hysterical contractions of her throat. However, she did contrive to go through the part--Garvey prompting. She knew she was ridiculous; she could not carry out a single one of the ideas of "business" which had come to her as she studied; she was awkward, inarticulate, panic-stricken.

"Rotten!" exclaimed Brent, when she had finished. "Couldn't be worse therefore, couldn't be better."

She dropped to a chair and sobbed hysterically.

"That's right--cry it out," said Brent. "Leave us alone, Garvey."

Brent walked up and down smoking until she lifted her head and glanced at him with a pathetic smile. "Take a cigarette," he suggested. "We'll talk it over. Now, we've got something to talk about."

She found relief from her embarrassment in the cigarette. "You can laugh at me now," she said. "I shan't mind. In fact, I didn't mind, though I thought I did. If I had, I'd not have let you see me cry."

"Don't think I'm discouraged," said Brent. "The reverse. You showed that you have nerve a very different matter from impudence. Impudence fails when it's most needed. Nerve makes one hang on, regardless. In such a panic as yours was, the average girl would have funked absolutely. You stuck it out. Now, you and I will try Lola's first entrance. No, don't throw away your cigarette. Lola might well come in smoking a cigarette." She did better. What Burlingham had once thoroughly drilled into her now stood her in good stead, and Brent's sympathy and enthusiasm gave her the stimulating sense that he and she were working together. They spent the afternoon on the one thing--Lola coming on, singing her gay song, her halt at sight of Santuzza and Turiddu, her look at Santuzza, at Turiddu, her greeting for each. They tried it twenty different ways. They discussed what would have been in the minds of all three. They built up "business" for Lola, and for the two others to increase the significance of Lola's actions.

"As I've already told you," said he, "anyone with a voice and a movable body can learn to act. There's no question about your becoming a good actress. But it'll be some time before I can tell whether you can be what I hope--an actress who shows no sign that she's acting."

Susan showed the alarm she felt. "I'm afraid you'll find at the end that you've been wasting your time," said she.

"Put it straight out of your head," replied he. "I never waste time. To live is to learn. Already you've given me a new play--don't forget that. In a month I'll have it ready for us to use. Besides, in teaching you I teach myself. Hungry?"

"No--that is, yes. I hadn't thought of it, but I'm starved."

"This sort of thing gives one an appetite like a field hand." He accompanied her to the door of the rear dressing-room on the floor below. "Go down to the reception room when you're ready," said he, as he left her to go on to his own suite to change his clothes. "I'll be there."

The maid came immediately, drew a bath for her, afterward helped her to dress. It was Susan's first experience with a maid, her first realization how much time and trouble one saves oneself if free from the routine, menial things. And then and there a maid was set down upon her secret list of the luxurious comforts to which she would treat herself--when? The craving for luxury is always a part, usually a powerful part, of an ambitious temperament. Ambition is simply a variously manifested and variously directed impulse toward improvement--a discomfort so keen that it compels effort to change to a position less uncomfortable. There had never been a time when luxury had not attracted her. At the slightest opportunity she had always pushed out for luxuries--for better food, better clothing, more agreeable surroundings. Even in her worst hours of discouragement she had not really relaxed in the struggle against rags and dirt. And when moral horror had been blunted by custom and drink, physical horror had remained acute. For, human nature being a development upward through the physical to the spiritual, when a process of degeneration sets in, the topmost layers, the spiritual, wear away first--then those in which the spiritual is a larger ingredient than the material--then those in which the material is the larger--and last of all those that are purely material. As life educated her, as her intelligence and her knowledge grew, her appreciation of luxury had grown apace and her desire for it. With most human beings, the imagination is a heavy bird of feeble wing; it flies low, seeing only the things of the earth. When they describe heaven, it has houses of marble and streets of gold. Their pretense to sight of higher things is either sheer pretense or sight at second hand. Susan was of the few whose fancy can soar. She saw the earthy things; she saw the things of the upper regions also. And she saw the lower region from the altitudes of the higher--and in their perspective.

As she and Brent stood together on the sidewalk before his house, about to enter his big limousine, his smile told her that he had read her thought--her desire for such an automobile as her very own. "I can't help it," said she. "It's my nature to want these things."

"And to want them intelligently," said he. "Everybody wants, but only the few want intelligently--and they get. The three worst things in the world are sickness, poverty and obscurity. Your splendid health safeguards you against sickness. Your looks and your brains can carry you far away from the other two. Your one danger is of yielding to the temptation to become the wife or the mistress of some rich man. The prospect of several years of heart-breaking hard work isn't wildly attractive at twenty-two."

"You don't know me," said Susan--but the boast was uttered under her breath.

The auto rushed up to Delmonico's entrance, came to a halt abruptly yet gently. The attentiveness of the personnel, the staring and whispering of the people in the palm room showed how well known Brent was. There were several women--handsome women of what is called the New York type, though it certainly does not represent the average New York woman, who is poorly dressed in flimsy ready-made clothes and has the mottled skin that indicates bad food and too little sleep. These handsome women were dressed beautifully as well as expensively, in models got in--not from--Paris. One of them smiled sweetly at Brent, who responded, so Susan thought, rather formally. She felt dowdy in her home-made dress. All her pride in it vanished; she saw only its defects. And the gracefully careless manner of these women--the manners of those who feel sure of themselves--made her feel "green" and out of place. She was disgusted with the folly that had caused her to thrill with pleasure when his order to his chauffeur at his door told her she was actually to be taken to one of the restaurants in which she had wished to exhibit herself with him. She heartily wished she had insisted on going where she would have been as well dressed and as much at home as anyone there.

She lifted her eyes, to distract her mind from these depressing sensations. Brent was looking at her with that amused, mocking yet sympathetic expression which was most characteristic of him. She blushed furiously.

He laughed. "No, I'm not ashamed of your homemade dress," said he. "I don't care what is thought of me by people who don't give me any money. And, anyhow, you are easily the most unusual looking and the most tastefully dressed woman here. The rest of these women are doomed for life to commonplace obscurity. You----

"We'll see your name in letters of fire on the Broadway temples of fame."

"I know you're half laughing at me," said Susan. "But I feel a little better."

"Then I'm accomplishing my object. Let's not think about ourselves. That makes life narrow. Let's keep the thoughts on our work--on the big splendid dreams that come to us and invite us to labor and to dare."

And as they lingered over the satisfactory dinner he had ordered, they talked of acting--of the different roles of "Cavalleria" as types of fundamental instincts and actions--of how best to express those meanings--how to fill out the skeletons of the dramatist into personalities actual and vivid. Susan forgot where she was, forgot to be reserved with him. In her and Rod's happiest days she had never been free from the constraint of his and her own sense of his great superiority. With Brent, such trifles of the petty personal disappeared. And she talked more naturally than she had since a girl at her uncle's at Sutherland. She was amazed by the fountain that had suddenly gushed forth in her mind at the conjuring of Brent's sympathy. She did not recognize herself in this person so open to ideas, so eager to learn, so clear in the expression of her thoughts. Not since the Burlingham days had she spent so long a time with a man in absolute unconsciousness of sex.

They were interrupted by the intrusion of a fashionable young man with the expression of assurance which comes from the possession of wealth and the knowledge that money will buy practically everything and everybody. Brent received him so coldly that, after a smooth sentence or two, he took himself off stammering and in confusion. "I suppose," said Brent when he was gone, "that young ass hoped I would introduce him to you and invite him to sit. But you'll be tempted often enough in the next few years by rich men without my helping to put temptation in your way,"

"I've never been troubled thus far," laughed Susan.

"But you will, now. You have developed to the point where everyone will soon be seeing what it took expert eyes to see heretofore."

"If I am tempted," said Susan, "do you think I'll be able to resist?"

"I don't know," confessed Brent. "You have a strong sense of honesty, and that'll keep you at work with me for a while. Then----

"If you have it in you to be great, you'll go on. If you're merely the ordinary woman, a little more intelligent, you'll probably--sell out. All the advice I have to offer is, don't sell cheap. As you're not hampered by respectability or by inexperience, you needn't." He reflected a moment, then added, "And if you ever do decide that you don't care to go on with a career, tell me frankly. I may be able to help you in the other direction."

"Thank you," said Susan, her strange eyes fixed upon him.

"Why do you put so much gratitude in your tone and in your eyes?" asked he.

"I didn't put it there," she answered. "It--just came. And I was grateful because--well, I'm human, you know, and it was good to feel--that--that----"

"Go on," said he, as she hesitated.

"I'm afraid you'll misunderstand."

"What does it matter, if I do?"

"Well--you've acted toward me as if I were a mere machine that you were experimenting with."

"And so you are."

"I understand that. But when you offered to help me, if I happened to want to do something different from what you want me to do, it made me feel that you thought of me as a human being, too."

The expression of his unseeing eyes puzzled her. She became much embarrassed when he said, "Are you dissatisfied with Spenser? Do you want to change lovers? Are you revolving me as a possibility?"

"I haven't forgotten what you said," she protested.

"But a few words from me wouldn't change you from a woman into a sexless ambition."

An expression of wistful sadness crept into the violet-gray eyes, in contrast to the bravely smiling lips. She was thinking of her birth that had condemned her to that farmer Ferguson, full as much as of the life of the streets, when she said:

"I know that a man like you wouldn't care for a woman of my sort."

"If I were you," said he gently, "I'd not say those things about myself. Saying them encourages you to think them. And thinking them gives you a false point of view. You must learn to appreciate that you're not a sheltered woman, with reputation for virtue as your one asset, the thing that'll enable you to get some man to undertake your support. You are dealing with the world as a man deals with it. You must demand and insist that the world deal with you on that basis." There came a wonderful look of courage and hope into the eyes of Lorella's daughter.

"And the world will," he went on. "At least, the only part of it that's important to you--or really important in any way. The matter of your virtue or lack of it is of no more importance than is my virtue or lack of it."

"Do you really believe that way?" asked Susan, earnestly.

"It doesn't in the least matter whether I do or not," laughed he. "Don't bother about what I think--what anyone thinks--of you. The point here, as always, is that you believe it, yourself. There's no reason why a woman who is making a career should not be virtuous. She will probably not get far if she isn't more or less so. Dissipation doesn't help man or woman, especially the ruinous dissipation of license in passion. On the other hand, no woman can ever hope to make a career who persists in narrowing and cheapening herself with the notion that her virtue is her all. She'll not amount to much as a worker in the fields of action."

Susan reflected, sighed. "It's very, very hard to get rid of one's sex."

"It's impossible," declared he. "Don't try. But don't let it worry you, either."

"Everyone can't be as strong as you are--so absorbed in a career that they care for nothing else."

This amused him. With forearms on the edge of the table he turned his cigarette slowly round between his fingers, watching the smoke curl up from it. She observed that there was more than a light sprinkle of gray in his thick, carefully brushed hair. She was filled with curiosity as to the thoughts just then in that marvelous brain of his; nor did it lessen her curiosity to know that never would those thoughts be revealed to her. What women had he loved? What women had loved him? What follies had he committed? From how many sources he must have gathered his knowledge of human nature of--woman nature! And no doubt he was still gathering. What woman was it now?

When he lifted his glance from the cigarette, it was to call the waiter and get the bill. "I've a supper engagement," he said, "and it's nearly eleven o'clock."

"Eleven o'clock!" she exclaimed.

"Times does fly--doesn't it?--when a man and a woman, each an unexplored mystery to the other, are dining alone and talking about themselves."

"It was my fault," said Susan.

His quizzical eyes looked into hers--uncomfortably far.

She flushed. "You make me feel guiltier than I am," she protested, under cover of laughing glance and tone of raillery.

"Guilty? Of what?"

"You think I've been trying to--to 'encourage' you," replied she frankly.

"And why shouldn't you, if you feel so inclined?" laughed he. "That doesn't compel me to be--encouraged."

"Honestly I haven't," said she, the contents of seriousness still in the gay wrapper of raillery. "At least not any more than----"

"You know, a woman feels bound to 'encourage' a man who piques her by seeming--difficult."

"Naturally, you'd not have objected to baptizing the new hat and dress with my heart's blood." She could not have helped laughing with him. "Unfortunately for you--or rather for the new toilette--my poor heart was bled dry long, long ago. I'm a busy man, too--busy and a little tired."

"I deserve it all," said she. "I've brought it on myself. And I'm not a bit sorry I started the subject. I've found out you're quite human--and that'll help me to work better."

They separated with the smiling faces of those who have added an evening altogether pleasant to memory's store of the past's happy hours--that roomy storehouse which is all too empty even where the life has been what is counted happy. He insisted on sending her home in his auto, himself taking a taxi to the Players' where the supper was given. The moment she was alone for the short ride home, her gayety evaporated like a delicious but unstable perfume.

Why? Perhaps it was the sight of the girls on the stroll. Had she really been one of them?--and only a few days ago? Impossible! Not she not the real self . . . and perhaps she would be back there with them before long. No--never, never, in any circumstances!. . . She had said, "Never!" the first time she escaped from the tenements, yet she had gone back. . . were any of those girls strolling along--were, again, any of them Freddie Palmer's? At the thought she shivered and quailed. She had not thought of him, except casually, in many months. What if he should see her, should still feel vengeful--he who never forgot or forgave--who would dare anything! And she would be defenseless against him. . . . She remembered what she had last read about him in the newspaper. He had risen in the world, was no longer in the criminal class apparently, had moved to the class of semi-criminal wholly respectable contractor-politician. No, he had long since forgotten her, vindictive Italian though he was.

The auto set her down at home. Her tremors about Freddie departed; but the depression remained. She felt physically as if she had been sitting all evening in a stuffy room with a dull company after a heavy, badly selected dinner. She fell easy prey to one of those fits of the blues to which all imaginative young people are at least occasional victims, and by which those cursed and hampered with the optimistic temperament are haunted and harassed and all but or quite undone. She had a sense of failure, of having made a bad impression. She feared he, recalling and reinspecting what she had said, would get the idea that she was not in earnest, was merely looking for a lover--for a chance to lead a life of luxurious irresponsibility. Would it not be natural for him, who knew women well, to assume from her mistakenly candid remarks, that she was like the rest of the women, both the respectable and the free? Why should he believe in her, when she did not altogether believe in herself but suspected herself of a secret hankering after something more immediate, more easy and more secure than the stage career? The longer she thought of it the clearer it seemed to her to be that she had once more fallen victim to too much hope, too much optimism, too much and too ready belief in her fellow-beings--she who had suffered so much from these follies, and had tried so hard to school herself against them.

She fought this mood of depression--fought alone, for Spenser did not notice and she would not annoy him. She slept little that night; she felt that she could not hope for peace until she had seen Brent again.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

Chapter XVI

TOWARD half-past ten the next day, a few minutes after Rod left for the theater, she was in the bathroom cleaning the coffee machine. There came a knock at the door of the sitting-room bedroom. Into such disorder had her mood of depression worried her nerves that she dropped the coffee machine into the washbowl and jumped as if she were seeing a ghost. Several dire calamities took vague shape in her mind, then the image of Freddie Palmer, smiling sweetly, cruelly. She wavered only a moment, went to the door, and after a brief hesitation that still further depressed her about herself she opened it. The maid--a good-natured sloven who had become devoted to Susan because she gave her liberal fees and made her no extra work--was standing there, in an attitude of suppressed excitement. Susan laughed, for this maid was a born agitator, a person who is always trying to find a thrill or to put a thrill into the most trivial event.

"What is it now, Annie?" Susan asked.

"Mr. Spenser--he's gone, hasn't he?"

"Yes--a quarter of an hour ago."

Annie drew a breath of deep relief. "I was sure he had went," said she, producing from under her apron a note. "I saw it was in a gentleman's writing, so I didn't come up with it till he was out of the way, though the boy brought it a little after nine."

"Oh, bother!" exclaimed Susan, taking the note.

"Well, Mrs. Spenser, I've had my lesson," replied Annie, apologetic but firm. "When I first came to New York, green as the grass that grows along the edge of the spring, what does I do but go to work and take up a note to a lady when her husband was there! Next thing I knew he went to work and hauled her round the floor by the hair and skinned out--yes, beat it for good. And my madam says to me, 'Annie, you're fired. Never give a note to a lady when her gent is by or to a gent when his lady's by. That's the first rule of life in gay New York.' And you can bet I never have since--nor never will."

Susan had glanced at the address on the note, had recognized the handwriting of Brent's secretary. Her heart had straightway sunk as if the foreboding of calamity had been realized. As she stood there uncertainly, Annie seized the opportunity to run on and on. Susan now said absently, "Thank you. Very well," and closed the door. It was a minute or so before she tore open the envelope with an impatient gesture and read:

DEAR MRS. SPENSER:

Mr. Brent requests me to ask you not to come until further notice. It may be sometime before he will be free to resume.

Yours truly, JOHN C. GARVEY.

It was a fair specimen of Garvey's official style, with which she had become acquainted--the style of the secretary who has learned by experience not to use frills or flourishes but to convey his message in the fewest and clearest words. Had it been a skillfully worded insult Susan, in this mood of depression and distorted mental vision, could not have received it differently. She dropped to a chair at the table and stared at the five lines of neat handwriting until her eyes became circled and her face almost haggard. Precisely as Rod had described! After a long, long time she crumpled the paper and let it fall into the waste-basket. Then she walked up and down the room--presently drifted into the bathroom and resumed cleaning the coffee machine. Every few moments she would pause in the task--and in her dressing afterwards--would be seized by the fear, the horror of again being thrust into that hideous underworld. What was between her and it, to save her from being flung back into its degradation? Two men on neither of whom she could rely. Brent might drop her at any time--perhaps had already dropped her. As for Rod--vain, capricious, faithless, certain to become an unendurable tyrant if he got her in his power--Rod was even less of a necessity than Brent. What a dangerous situation was hers! How slender her chances of escape from another catastrophe. She leaned against wall or table and was shaken by violent fits of shuddering. She felt herself slipping--slipping. It was all she could do to refrain from crying out. In those moments, no trace of the self-possessed Susan the world always saw. Her fancy went mad and ran wild. She quivered under the actuality of coarse contacts--Mrs. Tucker in bed with her--the men who had bought her body for an hour--the vermin of the tenements--the brutal hands of policemen.

Then with an exclamation of impatience or of anger she would shake herself together and go resolutely on--only again to relapse. "Because I so suddenly cut off the liquor and the opium," she said. It was the obvious and the complete explanation. But her heart was like lead, and her sky like ink. This note, the day after having tried her out as a possibility for the stage and as a woman. She stared down at the crumpled note in the wast-basket. That note--it was herself. He had crumpled her up and thrown her into the waste-basket, where she no doubt belonged.

It was nearly noon before she, dressed with unconscious care, stood in the street doorway looking about uncertainly as if she did not know which way to turn. She finally moved in the direction of the theater where Rod's play was rehearsing. She had gone to none of the rehearsals because Rod had requested it. "I want you to see it as a total surprise the first night," explained he. "That'll give you more pleasure, and also it will make your criticism more valuable to us." And she had acquiesced, not displeased to have all her time for her own affairs. But now she, dazed, stunned almost, convinced that it was all over for her with Brent, instinctively turned to Rod to get human help--not to ask for it, but in the hope that somehow he would divine and would say or do something that would make the way ahead a little less forbidding--something that would hearten her for the few first steps, anyhow. She turned back several times--now, because she feared Rod wouldn't like her coming; again because her experience--enlightened good sense--told her that Rod would--could--not help her, that her sole reliance was herself. But in the end, driven by one of those spasms of terror lest the underworld should be about to engulf her again, she stood at the stage door.

As she was about to negotiate the surly looking man on guard within, Sperry came rushing down the long dark passageway. He was brushing past her when he saw who it was. "Too late!" he cried. "Rehearsal's over."

"I didn't come to the rehearsal," explained Susan. "I thought perhaps Rod would be going to lunch."

"So he is. Go straight back. You'll find him on the stage. I'll join you if you'll wait a minute or so." And Sperry hurried on into the street.

Susan advanced along the passageway cautiously as it was but one remove from pitch dark. Perhaps fifty feet, and she came to a cross passage. As she hesitated, a door at the far end of it opened and she caught a glimpse of a dressing-room and, in the space made by the partly opened door, a woman half-dressed--an attractive glimpse. The woman--who seemed young--was not looking down the passage, but into the room. She was laughing in the way a woman laughs only when it is for a man, for the man--and was saying, "Now, Rod, you must go, and give me a chance to finish dressing." A man's arm--Rod's arm--reached across the opening in the doorway. A hand--Susan recognized Rod's well-shaped hand--was laid strongly yet tenderly upon the pretty bare arm of the struggling, laughing young woman--and the door closed--and the passage was soot-dark again. All this a matter of less than five seconds. Susan, ashamed at having caught him, frightened lest she should be found where she had no business to be, fled back along the main passage and jerked open the street door. She ran squarely into Sperry.

"I--I beg your pardon," stammered he. "I was in such a rush--I ought to have been thinking where I was going. Did I hurt you?" This last most anxiously. "I'm so sorry----"

"It's nothing--nothing," laughed Susan. "You are the one that's hurt."

And in fact she had knocked Sperry breathless. "You don't look anything like so strong," gasped he.

"Oh, my appearance is deceptive--in a lot of ways."

For instance, he could have got from her face just then no hint of the agony of fear torturing her--fear of the drop into the underworld.

"Find Rod?" asked he.

"He wasn't on the stage. So--I came out again."

"Wait here," said Sperry. "I'll hunt him up."

"Oh, no--please don't. I stopped on impulse. I'll not bother him." She smiled mischievously. "I might be interrupting."

Sperry promptly reddened. She had no difficulty in reading what was in his mind--that her remark had reminded him of Rod's "affair," and he was cursing himself for having been so stupid as to forget it for the moment and put his partner in danger of detection.

"I--I guess he's gone," stammered Sperry. "Lord, but that was a knock you gave me! Better come to lunch with me."

Susan hesitated, a wistful, forlorn look in her eyes. "Do you really want me?" asked she.

"Come right along," said Sperry in a tone that left no doubt of his sincerity. "We'll go to the Knickerbocker and have something good to eat."

"Oh, no--a quieter place," urged Susan.

Sperry laughed. "You mean less expensive. There's one of the great big differences between you and the make-believe ladies one bumps into in this part of town. You don't like to be troublesome or expensive. But we'll go to the Knickerbocker. I feel 'way down today, and I intended to treat myself. You don't look any too gay-hearted yourself."

"I'll admit I don't like the way the cards are running," said Susan. "But--they'll run better--sooner or later."

"Sure!" cried Sperry. "You needn't worry about the play. That's all right. How I envy women!"

"Why?"

"Oh--you have Rod between you and the fight. While I--I've got to look out for myself."

"So have I," said Susan. "So has everyone, for that matter."

"Believe me, Mrs. Spenser," cried Sperry, earnestly, "you can count on Rod. No matter what----"

"Please!" protested Susan. "I count on nobody. I learned long ago not to lean."

"Well, leaning isn't exactly a safe position," Sperry admitted. "There never was a perfectly reliable crutch. Tell me your troubles."

Susan smilingly shook her head. "That'd be leaning. . . . No, thank you. I've got to think it out for myself. I believed I had arranged for a career for myself. It seems to have gone to pieces That's all. Something else will turn up--after lunch."

"Not a doubt in the world," replied he confidently. "Meanwhile--there's Rod."

Susan's laugh of raillery made him blush guiltily. "Yes," said she, "there's Rod." She laughed again, merrily. "There's Rod--but where is there?"

"You're the only woman in the world he has any real liking for," said Sperry, earnest and sincere. "Don't you ever doubt that, Mrs. Spenser."

When they were seated in the café and he had ordered, he excused himself and Susan saw him make his way to a table where sat Fitzalan and another man who looked as if he too had to do with the stage. It was apparent that Fitzalan was excited about something; his lips, his arms, his head were in incessant motion. Susan noted that he had picked up many of Brent's mannerisms; she had got the habit of noting this imitativeness in men--and in women, too--from having seen in the old days how Rod took on the tricks of speech, manner, expression, thought even, of whatever man he happened at the time to be admiring. May it not have been this trait of Rod's that gave her the clue to his character, when she was thinking him over, after the separation?

Sperry was gone nearly ten minutes. He came, full of apologies. "Fitz held on to me while he roasted Brent. You've heard of Brent, of course?"

"Yes," said Susan.

"Fitz has been seeing him off. And he says it's----"

Susan glanced quickly at him. "Off?" she said.

"To Europe."

Susan had paused in removing her left glove. Rod's description of Brent's way of sidestepping--Rod's description to the last detail. Her hands fluttered uncertainly--fluttering fingers like a flock of birds flushed and confused by the bang of the gun.

"And Fitz says----"

"For Europe," said Susan. She was drawing her fingers slowly one by one from the fingers of her glove.

"Yes. He sailed, it seems, on impulse barely time to climb aboard. Fitz always lays everything to a woman. He says Brent has been mixed up for a year or so with---- Oh, it doesn't matter. I oughtn't to repeat those things. I don't believe 'em--on principle. Every man--or woman--who amounts to anything has scandal talked about him or her all the time. Good Lord! If Robert Brent bothered with half the affairs that are credited to him, he'd have no time or strength--not to speak of brains--to do plays."

"I guess even the busiest man manages to fit a woman in somehow," observed Susan. "A woman or so."

Sperry laughed. "I guess yes," said he. "But as to Brent, most of the scandal about him is due to a fad of his--hunting for an undeveloped female genius who----"

"I've heard of that," interrupted Susan. "The service is dreadfully slow here. How long is it since you ordered?"

"Twenty minutes--and here comes our waiter." And then, being one of those who must finish whatever they have begun, he went on. "Well, it's true Brent does pick up and drop a good many ladies of one kind and another. And naturally, every one of them is good-looking and clever or he'd not start in. But--you may laugh at me if you like--I think he's strictly business with all of them. He'd have got into trouble if he hadn't been. And Fitz admits this one woman--she's a society woman--is the only one there's any real basis for talk about in connection with Brent."

Susan had several times lifted a spoonful of soup to her lips and had every time lowered it untasted.

"And Brent's mighty decent to those he tries and has to give up. I know of one woman he carried on his pay roll for nearly two years----"

"Let's drop Mr. Brent," cried Susan. "Tell me about--about the play."

"Rod must be giving you an overdose of that."

"I've not seen much of him lately. How was the rehearsal?"

"Fair--fair." And Sperry forgot Brent and talked on and on about the play, not checking himself until the coffee was served. He had not observed that Susan was eating nothing. Neither had he observed that she was not listening; but there was excuse for this oversight, as she had set her expression at absorbed attention before withdrawing within herself to think--and to suffer. She came to the surface again when Sperry, complaining of the way the leading lady was doing her part, said: "No wonder Brent drops one after another. Women aren't worth much as workers. Their real mind's always occupied with the search for a man to support 'em."

"Not always," cried Susan, quivering with sudden pain. "Oh, no, Mr. Sperry--not always."

"Yes--there are exceptions," said Sperry, not noting how he had wounded her. "But--well, I never happened to run across one."

"Can you blame them?" mocked Susan. She was ashamed that she had been stung into crying out.

"To be honest--no," said Sperry. "I suspect I'd throw up the sponge and sell out if I had anything a lady with cash wanted to buy. I only suspect myself. But I know most men would. No, I don't blame the ladies. Why not have a nice easy time? Only one short life--and then--the worms."

She was struggling with the re-aroused insane terror of a fall back to the depths whence she had once more just come--and she felt that, if she fell again, it would mean the very end of hope. It must have been instinct or accident, for it certainly was not any prompting from her calm expression, that moved him to say:

"Now, tell me your troubles. I've told you mine. . . . You surely must have some?"

Susan forced a successful smile of raillery. "None to speak of," evaded she.

When she reached home there was a telegram--from Brent:

Compelled to sail suddenly. Shall be back in a few weeks. Don't mind this annoying interruption. R. B.

A very few minutes after she read these words, she was at work on the play. But--a very few minutes thereafter she was sitting with the play in her lap, eyes gazing into the black and menacing future. The misgivings of the night before had been fed and fattened into despairing certainties by the events of the day. The sun was shining, never more brightly; but it was not the light of her City of the Sun. She stayed in all afternoon and all evening. During those hours before she put out the light and shut herself away in the dark a score of Susans, every one different from every other, had been seen upon the little theater of that lodging house parlor-bedroom. There had been a hopeful Susan, a sad but resolved Susan, a strong Susan, a weak Susan; there had been Susans who could not have shed a tear; there had been Susans who shed many tears--some of them Susans all bitterness, others Susans all humility and self-reproach. Any spectator would have been puzzled by this shifting of personality. Susan herself was completely confused. She sought for her real self among this multitude so contradictory. Each successive one seemed the reality; yet none persisted. When we look in at our own souls, it is like looking into a many-sided room lined with mirrors. We see reflections--re-reflections--views at all angles--but we cannot distinguish the soul itself among all these counterfeits, all real yet all false because partial.

"What shall I do? What can I do? What will I do?"--that was her last cry as the day ended. And it was her first cry as her weary brain awakened for the new day.

At the end of the week came the regular check with a note from Garvey--less machine-like, more human. He apologized for not having called, said one thing and another had prevented, and now illness of a near relative compelled him to leave town for a few days, but as soon as he came back he would immediately call. It seemed to Susan that there could be but one reason why he should call--the reason that would make a timid, soft-hearted man such as he put off a personal interview as long as he could find excuses. She flushed hot with rage and shame as she reflected on her position. Garvey pitying her! She straightway sat down and wrote:

DEAR MR. GARVEY: Do not send me any more checks until Mr. Brent comes back and I have seen him. I am in doubt whether I shall be able to go on with the work he and I had arranged.

She signed this "Susan Lenox" and dispatched it. At once she felt better in spite of the fact that she had, with characteristic and fatal folly, her good sense warned her, cut herself off from all the income in sight or in prospect. She had debated sending back the check, but had decided that if she did she might give the impression of pique or anger. No, she would give him every chance to withdraw from a bargain with which he was not content; and he would get the idea that it was she who was ending the arrangement, would therefore feel no sense of responsibility for her. She would save her pride; she would spare his feelings. She was taking counsel of Burlingham these days--was recalling the lesson he had taught her, was getting his aid in deciding her course. Burlingham protested vehemently against this sending back of the check; but she let her pride, her aversion to being an object of pity, overrule him.

A few days more, and she was so desperate, so harassed that she altogether lost confidence in her own judgment. While outwardly she seemed to be the same as always with Rod, she had a feeling of utter alienation. Still, there was no one else to whom she could turn. Should she put the facts before him and ask his opinion? Her intelligence said no; her heart said perhaps. While she was hesitating, he decided for her. One morning at breakfast he stopped talking about himself long enough to ask carelessly:

"About you and Brent--he's gone away. What are you doing?"

"Nothing," said she.

"Going to take that business up again, when he comes back?"

"I don't know."

"I wouldn't count on it, if I were you. . . . You're so sensitive that I've hesitated to say anything. But I think that chap was looking for trouble, and when he found you were already engaged, why, he made up his mind to drop it."

"Do you think so?" said Susan indifferently. "More coffee?"

"Yes--a little. If my play's as good as your coffee---- That's enough, thanks. . . . Do you still draw your--your----"

His tone as he cast about for a fit word made her flush scarlet. "No--I stopped it until we begin work again."

He did not conceal his thorough satisfaction. "That's right!" he cried. "The only cloud on our happiness is gone. You know, a man doesn't like that sort of thing."

"I know," said Susan drily.

And she understood why that very night he for the first time asked her to supper after the rehearsal with Sperry and Constance Francklyn, the leading lady, with whom he was having one of those affairs which as he declared to Sperry were "absolutely necessary to a man of genius to keep him freshened up--to keep the fire burning brightly." He had carefully coached Miss Francklyn to play the part of unsuspected "understudy"--Susan saw that before they had been seated in Jack's ten minutes. And she also saw that he was himself resolved to conduct himself "like a gentleman." But after he had taken two or three highballs, Susan was forced to engage deeply in conversation with the exasperated and alarmed Sperry to avoid seeing how madly Rod and Constance were flirting. She, however, did contrive to see nothing--at least, the other three were convinced that she had not seen. When they were back in their rooms, Rod--whether through pretense or through sidetracked amorousness or from simple intoxication--became more demonstrative than he had been for a long time.

"No, there's nobody like you," he declared. "Even if I wandered I'd always come back to you."

"Really?" said Susan with careless irony. "That's good. No, I can unhook my blouse."

"I do believe you're growing cold."

"I don't feel like being messed with tonight."

"Oh, very well," said he sulkily. Then, forgetting his ill humor after a few minutes of watching her graceful movements and gestures as she took off her dress and made her beautiful hair ready for the night, he burst out in a very different tone: "You don't know how glad I am that you're dependent on me again. You'll not be difficult any more."

A moment's silence, then Susan, with a queer little laugh, "Men don't in the least mind--do they?"

"Mind what?"

"Being loved for money." There was a world of sarcasm in her accent on that word loved.

"Oh, nonsense. You don't understand yourself," declared he with large confidence. "Women never grow up. They're like babies--and babies, you know, love the person that feeds them."

"And dogs--and cats--and birds--and all the lower orders." She took a book and sat in a wrapper under the light.

"Come to bed--please, dear," pleaded he.

"No, I'll read a while."

And she held the book before her until he was asleep. Then she sat a long time, her elbows on her knees, her chin supported by her hands, her gaze fixed upon his face--the face of the man who was her master now. She must please him, must accept what treatment he saw fit to give, must rein in her ambitions to suit the uncertain gait and staying power of his ability to achieve. She could not leave him; he could leave her when he might feel so inclined. Her master--capricious, tyrannical, a drunkard. Her sole reliance--and the first condition of his protection was that she should not try to do for herself. A dependent, condemned to become even more dependent.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us