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

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

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

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

Ida made black coffee and the two girls, profoundly contented,
drank it and talked with that buoyant cheerfulness which
bubbles up in youth on the slightest pretext. In this case the
pretext was anything but slight, for both girls had health as
well as youth, had that freedom from harassing responsibility
which is the chief charm of every form of unconventional life.
And Susan was still in the first flush of the joy of escape
from the noisome prison whose poisons had been corroding her,
soul and body. No, poison is not a just comparison; what
poison in civilization parallels, or even approaches, in
squalor, in vileness of food and air, in wretchedness of
shelter and clothing, the tenement life that is really the
typical life of the city? From time to time Susan, suffused
with the happiness that is too deep for laughter, too deep for
tears even, gazed round like a dreamer at those cheerful
comfortable surroundings and drew a long breath--stealthily, as
if she feared she would awaken and be again in South Fifth
Avenue, of rags