rker, not from the life of the
poor as they take what is given them with hypocritical cringe
and tear of thanks, will the upper classes get the truth as to
what is thought of them by the masses in this day of awakening
intelligence and slow heaving of crusts so long firm that they
have come to be regarded as bed-rock of social foundation.

Cried the woman, in response to Susan's satirical look:

"You mock at that, my lovely young sister. Your lips are
painted, and they sneer. But you know I'm right--yes, you show
in your eyes that you know it in your aching heart! The wages
of sin is _death!_ Isn't that so, sister?"

Susan shook her head.

"Speak the truth, sister! God is watching you. The wages of
sin is _death!_"

"The wages of weakness is death," retorted Susan. "But--the
wages of sin--well, it's sometimes a house in Fifth Avenue."

And then she shrank away before the approving laughter of the
little crowd and hurried across into Eighth Street. In the
deep shadow of the front of Cooper Union she paused, as the
meaning of her own impulsive words came to her. The wages of
sin! And what was sin, the supreme sin, but weakness? It was
exactly as Burlingham had explained. He had said that, whether
for good or for evil, really to live one must be strong. Strong!

What a good teacher he had been--one of the rare kind that not
only said things interestingly but also said them so that you
never forgot. How badly she had learned!

She strolled on through Eighth Street, across Third Avenue and
into Second Avenue. It was ten o'clock. The effects of the
liquor she had drunk had worn away. In so much wandering she
had acquired the habit of closing up an episode of life as a
traveler puts behind him the railway journey at its end. She
was less than half an hour from her life in the Tenderloin; it
was as completely in her past as it would ever be. The cards
had once more been shuffled; a new deal was on.

A new deal. What? To fly to another city--that meant another
Palmer, or the miseries of the unprotected woman of the
streets, or slavery to the madman of what the French with cruel
irony call a _maison de joie_. To return to work----

What was open to her, educated as the comfortable classes
educate their women? Work meant the tenements. She loathed
the fast life, but not as she loathed vermin-infected
tenements. To toil all day at a monotonous task, the same task
every day and all day long!