her in
his handsome eyes. "You don't realize your good luck. But
you will when you find how many girls are crazy to get on the
good side of me. This is a great old town, and nobody amounts
to anything in it unless he's got a pull or is next to somebody
else that has."

Susan's slow reflective nod showed that this statement
explained, or seemed to explain, certain mysteries of life that
had been puzzling her.

"You've got a lot in you," continued he. "That's my opinion,
and I'm a fair judge of yearlings. You're liable to land
somewhere some day when you've struck your gait. . . . If
I had the mon I'd be tempted to set you up in a flat and keep
you all to myself. But I can't afford it. It takes a lot of
cash to keep me going. . . . You'll do well. You won't
have to bother with any but classy gents. I'll see that the
cops put you wise when there's anyone round throwing his money
away. And I can help you, myself. I've got quite a line of
friends among the rich chappies from Fifth Avenue. And I
always let my girls get the benefit of it."

My girls! Susan's mind, recovering now from its daze, seized
upon this phrase. And soon she had fathomed how these two
young men came to be so luxuriously dressed, so well supplied
with money. She had heard of this system under which the girls
in the streets were exploited as thoroughly as the girls in the
houses. In all the earth was there anyone who was suffered to
do for himself or herself without there being a powerful idle
someone else to take away all the proceeds but a bare living?
Helpless! Helpless!

"How many girls have you?" she asked.

"Jealous already!" And he laughed and blew a cloud of smoke
into her face.

She took the quarters he directed--a plain clean room two
flights up at seven dollars a week, in a furnished room house
on West Forty-third Street near Eighth Avenue. She was but a
few blocks from where she and Rod had lived. New York--to a
degree unrivaled among the cities of the world--illustrates in
the isolated lives of its never isolated inhabitants how little
relationship there is between space and actualities of
distance. Wherever on earth there are as many as two human
beings, one may see an instance of the truth. That an infinity
of spiritual solitude can stretch uncrossable even between two
locked in each other's loving arms! But New York's solitudes,
its separations, extend to the surface things. Susan had no
sense