get the money's
when you have money. And I've a feeling that you're not
particularly flush."

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

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

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