h a girl
alone and trying to get a start. Perhaps later on you'll be
more in the mood where I can help you."

"Perhaps," said Susan.

"But I hope not. It'll take uncommon luck to pull you
through--and I hope you'll have it."

"Thank you," said Susan. He took her hand, pressed it
friendlily--and she felt that he was a man with real good in
him, more good than many who would have shrunk from him in horror.

She was waiting for a thrust from fate. But fate,
disappointing as usual, would not thrust. It seemed bent on
the malicious pleasure of compelling her to degrade herself
deliberately and with calculation, like a woman marrying for
support a man who refuses to permit her to decorate with any
artificial floral concealments of faked-up sentiment the sordid
truth as to what she is about. She searched within herself in
vain for the scruple or sentiment or timidity or whatever it
was that held her back from the course that was plainly
inevitable. She had got down to the naked fundamentals of
decency and indecency that are deep hidden by, and for most of
us under, hypocrisies of conventionality. She had found out
that a decent woman was one who respected her body and her
soul, that an indecent woman was one who did not, and that
marriage rites or the absence of them, the absence of financial
or equivalent consideration, or its presence, or its extent or
its form, were all irrelevant non-essentials. Yet--she
hesitated, knowing the while that she was risking a greater
degradation, and a stupid and fatal folly to boot, by shrinking
from the best course open to her--unless it were better to take
a dose of poison and end it all. She probably would have done
that had she not been so utterly healthy, therefore overflowing
with passionate love of life. Except in fiction suicide and
health do not go together, however superhumanly sensitive the
sore beset hero or heroine. Susan was sensitive enough;
whenever she did things incompatible with our false and
hypocritical and unscientific notions of sensitiveness,
allowances should be made for her because of her superb and
dauntless health. If her physical condition had been morbid,
her conduct might have been, would have been, very different.

She was still hesitating when Saturday night came round
again--swiftly despite long disheartening days, and wakeful
awful nights. In the morning her rent would be due. She had
a dollar and forty-five cents.

After dinner al