To sleep at night with Tucker and
the vermin! To her notion the sights and sounds and smells and
personal contacts of the tenements were no less vicious;
were--for her at least--far more degrading than anything in the
Tenderloin and its like. And there she got money to buy
whiskey that whirled her almost endurably, sometimes even
gayly, over the worst things--money to buy hours, whole days of
respite that could be spent in books, in dreams and plannings,
in the freedom of a clean and comfortable room, or at the
theater or concert. There were degrees in horror; she was
paying a hateful price, but not so hateful as she had paid when
she worked. The wages of shame were not so hard earned as the
wages of toil, were larger, brought her many of the things she
craved. The wages of toil brought her nothing but the right to
bare existence in filth and depravity and darkness. Also, she
felt that if she were tied down to some dull and exhausting
employment, she would be settled and done for. In a few years
she would be an old woman, with less wages or flung out
diseased or maimed--to live on and on like hundreds of wretched
old creatures adrift everywhere in the tenement streets. No,
work had nothing to offer her except "respectability." And
what a mocking was "respectability," in rags and filth!
Besides, what had _she_, the outcast born, to do with this
respectability?

No--not work--never again. So long as she was roving about,
there was hope and chance somehow to break through into the
triumphant class that ruled the world, that did the things
worth while--wore the good clothes, lived in the good houses,
ate the good food, basked in the sunshine of art.

Either she would soar above respectability, or she would remain
beneath it. Respectability might be an excellent thing; surely
there must be some merit in a thing about which there was so
much talk, after which there was so much hankering, and to
which there was such desperate clinging. But as a sole
possession, as a sole ambition, it seemed thin and poor and
even pitiful. She had emancipated herself from its tyranny;
she would not resume the yoke. Among so many lacks of the good
things of life its good would not be missed. Perhaps, when she
had got a few other of the good things she might try to add it
to them--or might find herself able to get comfortably along
without it, as had George Eliot and Aspasia, George Sand and
Duse and Bernhardt and so many of