truthful through and through. But
this only gave her an opportunity for additional pleasure--the
pleasure of inventing lies that they would believe in spite of
their distrust of her. "Anyhow," said she, "haven't you
noticed the liars everybody's on to are always believed and
truthful people are doubted?"

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

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

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

And Susan felt that she would indeed arrive. Already she had
seen that there was no difficulty such as she had once imagined
about